RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF SERVICE QUALITY DIMENSIONS: A MULTISECTORAL STUDY

Three forces dominate the prevailing marketing environment in the service sector: increasing competition from private players, changing and improving technologies, and continuous shifts in the regulatory environment, which has led to the growing customer sophistication. Customers have become more and more aware of their requirements and demand higher standards of services. Their perceptions and expectations are continually evolving, making it difficult for the service providers to measure and manage services effectively. The key lies in improving the service selectively, paying attention to more critical service attributes/dimensions as a part of customer service management. It is an imperative to understand how sensitive the customers are to various service attributes or dimensions. Allocating resources in the fashion that is consistent with customer priorities can enhance the effectiveness in the service operations. In addition, customer service attribute priorities need to be fully explored in service specific contexts. This paper is an attempt to explore relative importance of service quality dimensions across a ‘select’ service context. The results suggest that (1) all the service quality dimensions are equally important as no proper order of their importance could be established, (2) the service performance in relation to the ‘expectations’ is poor in respect of nearly all the dimensions and in all the select services, and (3) the nature of service does not seem to have a role in establishing an order of importance of the dimensions.