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A service is a complicated phenomenon. The word is used in many meanings, ranging from personal service to a service as a product. The term can be even broader in scope. A machine can be turned into a service to a customer, if the seller makes efforts to tailor-make the solution to meet the most detailed demands of the customer. In the latter case, the machine is still a physical good, of course, but the way of treating the customer with an appropriately designed machine is a service. Moreover, there are a variety of administratively used services, such as billing and handling claims, which in reality are services to the customer. Frequently, they are taken care of in such a way that they are not perceived as services, but rather as nuisances.
The purpose of the present article is to discuss how service quality is perceived by customers. A conceptual model of perceived quality is described and a number of common characteristics of good quality, called the six criteria of good perceived service quality, are presented.
What Are Services: Common Characteristics
A whole range of characteristics of services has been suggested and discussed in the literature.5,14,15,16,18 Four basic characteristics can be identified for most services:
Services are more or less intangible.
Services are activities or a series of activities rather than things.
Services are at least to some extent produced and consumed simultaneously.
The customer participates in the production process at least to some extent.
A service is normally perceived in a subjective manner. When services are described by customers, expressions such as experiences, trust, feeling, and security are used.
Because of its high degree of intangibility, it is frequently difficult for the customer to evaluate a service.
How do you give a distinct value to 'trust' or a `feeling,' for example? Therefore, it is often suggested in the literature that one should tangibilize a service for the customer by using concrete, physical evidence such as plastic cards and various kinds of documents.17
Because a service is not a thing but a series of activities or processes, which moreover are produced and consumed simultaneously at least to some extent, it is difficult to manage quality control and to do marketing in the traditional sense....