Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations

by Valarie A.; Berry A. Zeithaml

Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perception of the value of a particular service with the customer's need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery.The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service - reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles - goes right to the heart of the tendancy to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceievd quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.

Genres: Business

Paperback

First published March 19, 1990

Reviews

[Barry Avis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Delivering Quality Service – Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations discusses the problem of poor customer service (primarily in the US) and provides a system called Servqual designed to identify where the shortfalls for an organisation are to allow them to put into place corrective improvements. It identifies five “gaps” that the writers have identified as the basis for the Servqual system including “Gap 1 – Not knowing what customer expect” and “Gap 4 – When promises do not match delivery”. The book is a good basic reminder about how to improve the service in a service based industry and can be used to help improve some common areas such as Senior Leadership being out of touch with those providing the hands on service to their customers and front line service providers not understanding what services they are supposed to be providing.
The book provides some good ideas for those new to the world of Quality and some reminders for those of us who have worked in the field for many years.
The book however has a couple of flaws one of its own making and one that the writers could not help. The first is the somewhat basic diagrams in the book for example chapter 3 discusses the gaps mentioned above and on page 39 there is a diagram consisting of two boxes (one for customer expectations and the other for management perceptions of customer expectations) with an arrow between them and the word “Gap”. I felt a little insulted to think that the writers could not assume that I know what a gap looks like. The other issue, relates to the age of the book which was written in the 1980’s. Since then, technology has moved on massively in most of the businesses they discuss (e.g. banking and loans) and a lot of the methods they discuss have become out dated with the advent of on-line banking and the massive increase in the use of smart phones. This makes some of their suggestions too out of touch to improve service provision (in the book they see ATMs as a great innovation - which they were – but in the 2020’s the increase in cashless sales is slowly making them obsolete).
Despite the age of this book, it is still a good reference on the basics of customer service and a recommended read, it would be great to see them publish an update.

[المهند السبيعي · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can get bored from the volume of research findings... As readers we haveore bias towards books full of stories, visuals...etc.

However, this book can be described as a scientific practical book ... You read to learn some real stuff not to entertain yourself...

It is old but old is gold is applicable on this book ... I loved it.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book I bought when I had my own business and had hopes I could learn from it. Even if I still had a business, this book would fail to deliver quality service.
It's amazing how dry and painful reading some people can make a book.

[Zaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

ini salah satu buku pendukung TA gw...hehehe...it's a good book anyway...