A study on the difference of consumers' service quality recognition: approaches according to service category and experience

Lee Jun Youb(Departaent of Business Administration Graduate School of Seoul National University)

Parasuramam, Zeithaml and Berry has made a great contribution to the study of service quality.

They have made 10 dimentions that consumers evaluate service quality by and they conclude that service quality judgements comprise of five underlying attributes. Afterwards they combine 10 dimentions to five underlying attributes and they have developed SERVQUAL model . These five underlying attributes are tangibles, reliability responsive, assurance, and empathy.

SERVQUAL model's key point is that consumers evaluate on the basis of the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm. That is, assessing service quality involves measuring the magnitude and direction of the gap between customer perceptions of the firm's actual performance and expectations of performance along five service quality dimentions.

On the contrary, Cronin h Taylor proposed SERVPERF model that consumers evaluate service quality as performance itself not performance-minus-expectations.

Though there isn't one definition of service quality but there is some agreements. First, service quality is not one attribute but is composed of several attributes. Second, consumers recognized service quality by comparison of performance & expectations.

This research focuses on service quality determinants' importance difference according to service category

Traditional researches of service quality have used the concepts which can is applied to whole service industry. But services are very various in type and character and these researches have some problems. Therefore this research investigates what differences in service quality determinants' importance exist according to service category .

Second purpose of this research is to find differences of consumers' recognition about importance of service quality attributes between before-experiance and after-experiance. It is found that consumers' recognitions are cumulative and dynamic. and then what kind of differences exist in a concrete way?

The results are as follows.

First, consumers evaluation of service quality are different according to service category .

Consumers consider such attributes as uptodate equipment, physical facilities, personal attention, and accessibility as more important attributes in services directed at people. And they consider such attributes as providing service timely, keeping the promise, dealing the customer's problems as more important attributes in services directed at goods.

Second, there are some differences in consumers' recognitions about service quality attributes between before and after experiance.

Third, the changes of consumers' recognitions about service quality attributes between before and after experiance are greater when they don't know details of the service.

Kay Word: Service quality, Service quality determinants, Dynamic approach to Service quality SERVQUAL, SERVPERF