Reexamination Of Service Quality Scale

A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Leonard L. Berry developed a 22-item instrusment, called SERVQUAL, for assessing customer perceptions of service quality in service and retailing organizations in 1985, and then refined it in 1988. From then on, SERVQUAL scale has been used widly.From the service quality literatures we found that A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry had done much to purify the SERVQUAL scale—to delete some items and low the multicollinearity of items when the instrusment was developped at the beginning, cut down the ten dimensions into five. But, the three scholars pointed out that the items were still interrelated and one fruitful area for future research was to explore the nature and causes of the multicollinearity. If the items are interrelated strongly, the predictive capability will be influenced.The original version of SERVQUAL scale consists of two sections: a 22-item section to measure customers'service expections of companies within a specfic sector and a corresponding 22-item section to measure custmers'perceptions of a particular company in that sector. Because of the multicollinearity among items and the length of the questionnair, the instrument is not implemented idealy as it supposed to be.Using data collected through a survey of consumers of restaurants, the study makes hypotheses of the interrelationships, develops a new scale with less interrelated items, tests the multicollinearity among items. Therefore, by using the new scale developped, service provider can short down its questionnair, only the following four items have direct significant impact on overrall service quality――F1(provide its services it promises to do), F13(employees can answer customers'questions correctly), F15(employees have customers'interests at heart), F18(service provider has operating hours convenient to all customers). It cuts down the multicollinearity among items in the scale theoretically, makes its survey simpler while with good validity. In addition, it analyzes the items which have no significant impacts on overrall service qulity( including direct and indirect ) by using product's five hierarchy theory. It illustrates the fact that the physical items have become expected products, that is to say they have been considered the attributes and conditions which service must have, once they meet certain standard they cannot increase customers'satisfation no matter how they are improved.