SERVQUAL A Client-based Approach to Developing Performance Indicators Colleen Cook, Vicki Coleman, and Fred Heath

Those included, Question 20, “Convenient business hours,” Question 13, “Employees have knowledge to answer customers’ questions,” Question 8, “Willingness to help customers,” Question 9,

SERVQUAL: A Client-based Approach to Developing Performance Indicators Colleen Cook, Vicki Coleman, and Fred Heath

3 rd Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, 27-31 August 1999

Abstract

The Sterling C Evans Libraries at Texas A&M University administered the SERVQUAL survey to university users in 1995, 1997 and 1999 SERVQUAL is a gap model for assessing service quality Reliability, or internal consistency, of scores for all three years was evaluated by computing Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, and construct validity was evaluated with a factor analysis Specific issues of strategic interest for local library administrators are considered at the individual question level Additionally, a specific analytical model, Six Sigma, is evaluated for its applicability for quantifying the gap Future applications for the use of SERVQUAL in identifying best practices among research libraries are explored

SERVQUAL: A Client-based Approach to Developing Performance Indicators Colleen Cook, Vicki Coleman, and Fred Heath

3 rd Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, 27-31 August 1999

Background

SERVQUAL in 1998, Terry Grapentine, the symposium’s organizer, opened the meeting

at the flood, leads onto fortune." He explained:

In the early 1980s, concerns about customer satisfaction and

product quality became emerging tides in the affairs of industry

and academia And in the early 1980s, three academicians boarded

their service quality boat and rode the tide And what a ride they had

Their work not only spawned numerous articles, books, conference

presentations, and consulting engagements, but also significantly

affected how many organizations went about measuring service quality

(Grapentine, p 4)

In their landmark papers, "A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research," (1985), and “SERVQUAL: A Multiple-item Scale for Measuring Customer Perceptions of Service Quality” (1988), A Parasuraman, Leonard Berry, and Valarie Zeithaml proposed a Gap Model for assessing service quality According to the authors, the key to optimizing service quality is to maximize the difference between two customer-derived measures, perceptions and expectations The

enthusiasts

As service providers, the Gap Model was immediately and intuitively appealing to research librarians in North America Librarians had struggled for some time to augment

the tried and true production oriented statistics represented in ARL Statistics with service

assessments (Andaleeb and Simmonds, 1998; Coleman et al, 1997; Nitecki, 1996a, 1996b, 1998; Stein, 1998) Over the past several years the Association of Research Libraries has confronted the potential divergence between statistical measurement of expenditures for ranking purposes and the need for additional measures to assess outcomes From an ARL retreat held in Tucson in January, 1999 emerged a dedicated effort to develop the data and measurement tools that could accurately describe today’s research libraries (ARL New Measures: 2) A recent call by the Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) Board for new measures for determining library performance included user satisfaction as one of eight areas of focus for study Although the use of SERVQUAL to assess service quality in library settings has been the subject of several studies, to date there has not been a report of comparisons of SERVQUAL results over multiple years in academic libraries The General Libraries of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas was a SERVQUAL pioneer in administering the survey in 1995 and has surveyed users subsequently each two years in 1997 and in 1999

Our analysis of SERVQUAL considers both issues generalizable to academic libraries

as a whole, and local, strategic issues of use in managerial decisions at the institution level, in our case, the General Libraries at Texas A&M University General issues include:

groups by year?

Specific issues of strategic interest for local library administrators are considered at the individual question level, particularly :

from year to year?

perceived expectations exist?

The SERVQUAL instrument used at Texas A&M consisted of 22 questions and a set

of 5 questions that were used to assign weights, or relative importance, to the larger question

set As shown in Table 1 respondents answered each question on three scales: minimum,

desired and perceived ratings on a Likert-type scale of 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) An identical instrument was used for each of the three assessments in 1995, 1997 and 1999 Samples of staff, faculty, undergraduate and graduate students were derived on a random basis from university student registration and payroll databases The survey was mailed to respondents with standard follow up procedures A total sample of nearly 700 responses for the three years was analyzed.

concise forms)

Q.17 Visually appealing facilities

Table 1

General Issues

Are SERVQUAL scores valid and reliable? Reliability, or internal consistency, of

SERVQUAL scores for all three years was evaluated by computing Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, which were uniformly high across various scales, years and user groups Construct validity was evaluated with a factor analysis of SERVQUAL scores to determine whether we were accurately testing the five dimensions intended by the originators of the

instrument (i.e., tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy) In similar

results to those reported by Nitecki (1996) and Andaleeb and Simmonds (1998), our factor analysis identified three rather than five factors:

Affect of Service Experience, which is primarily a confluence of the

responsiveness, assurance and empathy dimensions;

Service Reliability, fairly analogous to the reliability dimension; and

Tangibles (Cook and Thompson, 1999).

Were there noteworthy differences between results by year or by role group?

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests for minimum, desired and perceived expectations at the dimension and item level by year yielded little statistically significant data and when

been more the result of fairly large sample sizes rather than any particularly noteworthy

change in user expectations over the five years under study Analyses by user group faculty, university staff, graduate or undergraduate student also produced similar results

Institution-level Strategic Issues

Since a recent factor analysis (Cook and Thompson, 1999) failed to recover the conventional five SERVQUAL dimensions, and therefore, the validity of analysis by five dimensions appears questionable, we examined responses to item or individual questions for trends which would be useful for library managers

What questions were the most and least important to respondents in terms of highest and lowest means? Were these consistently rated over the three survey administrations? The same six questions received the highest mean responses of the 22

questions for minimum expectations each year Question 11, “Providing services as

promised,” received the highest mean response for minimum expectations for all three years The next five questions with highest means were the same for the three years under study, but

varied in order Those included, Question 20, “Convenient business hours,” Question 13,

“Employees have knowledge to answer customers’ questions,” Question 8, “Willingness to

help customers,” Question 9, “Maintaining error-free customer and catalog records,” and

Question 4, “Providing service at the promised time.”

Questions With Highest

Minimum Mean Expectations

Providing services

as promised Convenient business hours Knowledge to answer customers’ questions Willingness to help customers Maintaining error-free records Providing service at the promised time

YEAR

Figure 1

The six questions receiving the lowest minimum means scores fell into the tangibles

factor and were also consistent over the three survey administrations: Question 17, “Visually appealing facilities,” Question 6, “Visually appealing materials associated with the service,” and Question 19, “Employees who have a neat, professional appearance.” It is noteworthy

that overall means for minimum expectations have been gradually rising from 1995 to 1999 Users expect more of us over time

Regarding desired service expectations, Question 13, “Employees having the

knowledge to answer customer questions” received the highest or second highest mean score

all three years and Question 11, “Providing services as promised came in a close second.

Question 8, “Willingness to help customers” and Question 20, “Convenient business hours”

were also consistently ranked in the highest six mean scores across years in a fashion parallel

to minimum expectations

Questions With Highest Desired Mean Expectations

Providing services

as promised Convenient hours

Knowledge to answer questions Willingness to help customers Maintaining error-free records Providing service at the promised time Readiness to respond

to questions Modern equipment

YEAR

Figure 2

Three questions were included inconsistently in the top six desired across years:

Question 15, “Readiness to respond to customers’ questions,” Question 21, “Modern

equipment,” and Question 4, “Providing service at the promised time.” In that these questions

were not included in users highest minimum mean rankings, these may constitute the

discriminant factors in respondents’ views of minimum vs desired expectations Consistent with minimum responses were the three questions related to tangibles with the lowest desired mean scores

Figure 3 shows those questions receiving the highest mean scores for perceived quality service by year

Questions With Highest Perceived Mean Expectations

Providing services

as promised Convenient hours

Knowledge to answer questions Willingness to help customers Providing service at the promised time Modern equipment

Assure accuracy

of transactions Performing services right the first time

YEAR

Figure 3

Parasuraman, Berry and Zeithaml (1985, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1994) measure service

adequacy as the difference between customers’ minimum and perceived expectations, and service superiority as the difference between desired expectations and perceived expectations Service quality is assessed by discerning where perception falls within a zone of tolerance,

i.e., the range between minimum and desired scores

Management’s goal is to achieve perceived rankings as close to desired scores as possible on the service quality issues most important to users (questions with highest minimum means), while altogether avoiding perceived scores falling outside the zone of tolerance As an example, Figure 4 indicates the zone of tolerance in the 1999 survey

Factored SERVQUAL

Questions - 1999

Figure 4

The question with the highest perceived mean score for all three years was Question

20, “Convenient business hours.” This question was also consistently ranked among the top

six minimum and desired expectations - good news for library managers at Texas A&M

University Question 4, “Providing services at the promised time”, Question 8, “Willingness

to help customers,” and Question 11, “Providing services as promised” were also consistently

included in the top six mean scores for minimum, desired and perceived expectations—more

good news In contrast, however, Question 9,“Maintaining error-free customer and catalog

records” was listed in the top minimum means, but among the three lowest mean perception rankings over the three years—not good news for library management In a similar manner

there is an apparent gap between minimum, desired and perceived expectations for Question

13, “Employees have knowledge to answer customers questions.” While this question ranked

highest or second highest in mean scores of the desired responses; perceived rankings have

Further insight into the nature of the two problem areas identified in Question 9,

“Maintaining error-free customer and catalog records,” and Question 13, “Employees have

knowledge to answer customers’ questions” is discernible by examining responses by user group to these questions Figure 5 shows that faculty and graduate students are most concerned by the lack of reliability in record keeping

Maintaining Error-free Customer

and Catalog Records

USER GROUP

YEAR

Figure 5

While improvements have been made in the minds of undergraduate students in this area, earlier marginal improvements in 1997 have been lost in the view of faculty and graduate

students in 1999 Figure 6 shows dramatically how perceptions of Question 13, “Employees

have knowledge to answer customers’ questions” have fallen precipitously in all but the staff user group in 1999

Employees Have Knowledge to

Answer Questions

USER GROUP

YEAR

Figure 6

Quantifying the Gap Model: Six Sigma

Typically, manufacturing firms take the lead in implementing quality programs to enhance productivity and to improve customer satisfaction Now, service organizations, such as libraries, are beginning to understand what their manufacturing counterparts learned that quality does not improve unless you measure it A successful program

employed in manufacturing, six sigma, could also have application in the service sector

using SERVQUAL data

The Greek letter sigma is used as a symbol by statisticians to denote the standard

deviation of a set of data Six sigma is a disciplined, quantitative approach to analyzing

the root causes of problems and solving them It involves measuring, analyzing,

improving and controlling a process such that tolerance limits are six standard deviations

away from the process mean A process rated at six sigma will produce fewer than 3.4

defects per million operations

Phillip Crosby, in Quality is Free (1979), introduced the concept of zero defects During the 1980's, Motorola Corporation took the concept of zero defects a step further and institutionalized six sigma methodologies to improve production of pagers, cellular phones, and other products Their success with six sigma techniques popularized it as a tool for product improvement in every facet of business The purpose for practicing six

sigma techniques is to create a process for tracking annual improvements in customer

satisfaction and to provide a common basis for benchmarking against best-in-class libraries Also, "this measurement standard allows comparisons of similar and dissimilar processes and companies of various sizes and in various industries" (Fontenot, p 73)

The radar graph derived from the SERVQUAL responses highlights the library's strengths and weaknesses with regards to customer satisfaction In particular, Figure 4

shows that the average perceived score for Question 9, Maintain error free customer and

catalog records, falls out of the zone of tolerance When the perceived score is

subtracted from the minimum score for each of the 231 survey respondents, the

distribution is represented by the bar graph in Figure 7 The grey bars (negative scores) represent scores where perceived is less than the minimum level The black bars

represent perceived scores that are either equal to or greater than the minimum level