Managing service quality: a study in the UK roadside lodge sector.

Abstract

Service quality is increasingly becoming an important issue for organisations to consider when attempting to satisfy customers and remain competitive in the marketplace. Delivering consistent service quality though appears to present difficulties for many organisations,but this can largely be attributed to the poor understanding of services and the poor understanding of the service quality concept. This thesis has illustrated how services and service quality can be better understood by its review of the literature and by discussing alternative perspectives. Service quality is considered to be a subjective,multi-faceted concept which exists in the mind of each and every individual in a unique way, but which may be partly controlled by understanding customers' separate expectations and their separate perceptions of the service as they pass through the service delivery system. The control and improvement of this service process is considered to be highly dependent upon the organisation's ability to keep customers' expectations within achievable parameters, and upon the service employees' ability to control the customers'perceptions as they pass through the service delivery system. Both the organisation's managers and employees though need to have a good understanding of customers' expectations and perceptions to ensure the consistent delivery of service quality. Several well established research techniques were used to collect empirical data to achieve the research aim in showing how the delivery of service quality can be understood more effectively by using both customers'and employees' perceptions of the service experience. This study illustrated how perceptual gap analysis,service blue printing,and the soft systems methodology can be combined to explore both customers'and employees' perceptions of the service experience. This resulted in the development of a new research technique which has been called 'perceptual blueprinting'. The study was carried out with the collaboration of one organisation in the UK roadside lodge sector where the consistent delivery of service quality is particularly crucial to its continued success. The results from the study have raised some important methodological and substantive issues surrounding the identification and control of service quality in both the roadside lodge sector and service industries in general,and subsequently should provide some value to both acaden-dcs and practitioners alike.