Customer perceptions of service quality: A critique

Abstract

Empirical research on service quality and satisfaction has unearthed multitudinous archetypes by various researchers across the world. However, all of them have been primarily built on the SERVQUAL instrument, a 22-item scale that measures service quality. The efficacy of SERVQUAL in measuring service quality has been criticized by different authors for diverse reasons, such as the operationalization of expectations, the reliability and validity of the instrument's difference score formulation and the scale's dimensionality across disparate industrial settings. In spite of these animadversions, there is a universal conformity that the 22 items are reasonably good predictors of service quality in its entirety. But a scrupulous scrutiny of the scale items connotes that the scale is not all-inclusive in the sense that it fails to address some of the critical aspects of customer perceived service quality. This paper endeavours to unearth and unravel such critical constituents of service quality which, hitherto, have been untouched in the literature, and advances a framework that could form the bedrock for a better understanding of customer perceived service quality and its determinants.