Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality : The Case of Croatia

Abstract

Changing dominant goals in the society development, from the food production in agricultural society and goods production in the industrial society to service production in information society, leads to the changes in critical factors from the land and capital to a human. Information society for service production encompasses participation of all – providers and users joint by the common purposes, measurable goals, optimally used resources and flexible structures. Since we are involved in the globalization process through market, where we are positioned quite low on the global scale of competitiveness, the identity of personal and national corpus can be expressed more qualitatively with the new public sector positioning, creating the administration at its service to users. Since the service production in the companies of public interest, institutions and profit orientated companies is characterized by immateriality, i.e. intangibility, inseparability, quality inconstancy, impossibility of storing and transience, there is a problem of the quantification and management of service quality. Imperative but challenging job is to create instruments for measuring the service quality in, for example, education, health, culture and tourism, establishing them upon the relation between user's expectation and perception of received service quality. The research’ s hypothesis is that, between the expected and obtained service, there is a gap between dimensions of reliability, trust, tangibility, complaisance and identification of service provider with the service user. The aims of the present research are to: (1) assess the students perceptions of service quality at the Faculty of Law in Osijek, Croatia, (2) test the reliability of an modified SERVPERF scale (named UNIQUAL), (3) establish the number of dimensions of service quality in law management higher education, (4) determine which dimensions is the best predictor of the overall service quality in Croatian law higher education.