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摘要
Quality of service is becoming an increasingly important differentiator among competing businesses in the retail sector. Development and potential applications are described of a multiple-item instrument called SERVQUAL for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. It is a 22-item instrument that addresses many elements of service quality divided into the 5 dimensions: 1. tangibles, 2. reliability, 3. responsiveness, 4. assurance, and 5. empathy. Following a discussion of the conceptualization and operationalization of the service quality construct, procedures used in constructing and refining a multiple-item scale to measure the construct are described. Evidence is provided to the scale's reliability, factor structure, and validity on the basis of analyzing data from 4 distinct samples. Potential applications include categorizing the firm's customers into quality segments and tracking service levels of individual stores in a chain.