A Research Report based on an analysis of Service Quality of Sports Centre (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: Distinction, University of Lincoln, course: titel, language: English, abstract: It is an immensely complex exercise to measure the quality of a service. There are differences between product and service. In case of product, there are precise specifications such as length, depth, width, weight, color etc. On the other hand, a service can have several intangible or qualitative features. In addition, there are some expectations of the consumer regarding the service, which can differ significantly based on a range of factors such as experience, personal requirements and what other people may have said to them.
To determine the service quality Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1994) have developed a methodology known as 'SERVQUAL' which is a service quality questionnaire survey methodology. SERVQUAL model suggested five dimensions of service quality. They are reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy, and assurance. Experiences or perceptions and expectation are measured in SERVQUAL model and SERVQUAL model has been well used in retail surroundings (Berry, 1986; Brown et al., 1993; Carmen, 1990; Finn and Lamb, 1991; Dabholkar et al., 1996) including banking, fast food, dry cleaning (Cronin and Taylor, 1992) and health care (Babakus and Mangold, 1989). In diversified businesses as the technologically advanced industrial market(Pitt et al., 1992) and B2B (business to business) services (Brensinger and Lambert,1990) include the application of the SERVQUAL.
However, this model raises some doubts as to whether expectations are being assessed at all. The gap measured by the SERVQUAL model between expectation and perception is uncertain as to whether this is an indication of initial expectation or how the service is continuously reevaluated whilst it is being executed, or experienced. Therefore, SERVPERF model is proposed by Cronin and Taylor (1992), and this model eliminates expectation from the SERVQUAL, and it measures the service quality based on service perception. In this paper, the SERVPERF model is used to measure the service quality of the sports centre.