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Introduction
Quality of service is an important key for companies that want to survive in an era of increasingly competitive competition. In the marketing literature, quality service is the key to organizational success (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Ladhari, 2009) and provides sustainable competitive advantage (Olorunniwo et al., 2006) through quality services, the organization is certain to be able to increase profitability (Rust and Zahorik, 1993), repeat sales (Abdullah, 2006b), competitive (Magd et al., 2003), cost efficiency (Parasuraman et al., 1988; Kassim and Abdullah, 2010), positive word-of-mouth (Bolton and Drew, 1991), product differentiation (Abdullah, 2006b), satisfying customers (Yunus et al., 2010), trusted customers (Omar et al., 2009) and fostering loyalty customers (Kassim and Abdullah, 2010).
Quality of service in the context of higher education becomes an important issue because competition in this sector is very tight, the vision of program internationalization, high expectations of stakeholders, demands for customer accountability and diversification of marketable programs (Ling et al., 2010; Sumaedi et al., 2012; Abdullah, 2006a). Quality at higher education (HE) institutions becomes a competitive weapon to serve and attract key customers (students) (Senthilkumar and Arulraj, 2011). The quality of HE services is assessed according to students’ perceptions (Sumaedi et al., 2012) because they are the main customers who directly enjoy the services offered (Hill, 1995; Sakthivel et al., 2005; Telford and Masson, 2005) and become quality monitoring effective (Hill et al., 2003). Therefore, efforts to identify the determinants that are used as instruments for measuring overall perceived service quality (PSQ) in HE becomes an important issue (Abdullah, 2006a; Ling et al., 2010).
The problem to date is that academics still have difficulty understanding the construct of service quality, especially defining the concepts and measurement instruments (Parasuraman et al., 1985; Carman, 1990; Bolton and Drew, 1991). During this time, research on perceptions of HE service quality has been widely adopted from western scientists (SERVQUAL – Parasuraman et al., 1988; SERVPERF – Cronin and Taylor, 1992) to evaluate student experiences on the quality of higher education (Sahney et al., 2004; Tan and Kek, 2004; Yousapronpaiboon, 2014; Galeeva, 2016). However, measurements using these scales experience limitations, especially not being able to measure socio-cultural aspects (i.e....