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It is important to close four gaps to improve the quality of service in any organisation, according to A Parasuraman, James W McLamore, Chair and Professor of Marketing at Miami Business School, University of Miami.
Delivering the keynote address at the marketing conference on the theme ‘Marketing, Society and Disruption’, organised by the TA Pai Management Institute (TAPMI) at Manipal on Friday, he said four major organisational deficiencies – ‘marketing information gap’, ‘standards gap’, ‘service performance gap’, and ‘internal communications gap’ – lead to service quality shortfall that customers often experience.
Customers’ expectations
Service quality results from a comparison of customers’ service expectations with their actual service experience. He said the marketing information gap is the disconnect between what customers’ expectations really are and what management thinks those expectations are. Many a time, well-meaning managers might introduce things that may not reflect what the customers want.
Highlighting the standards gap, he said it has to go with situations where managers might have reasonable understanding of what the customers’ expectations are, but they don’t take the effort or don’t know how to translate that knowledge into concrete specifications.
On the service performance gap, he said even if some companies have a lot of standards they may not be able to deliver the standards due to various causes. “It is not enough to have standards, but you should also have the wherewithal to deliver those standards,” he said.
Referring to the internal communications gap, he said customers are being touched by a number of different arms in certain companies. He said the organisation needs to close all these gaps, if it truly wants to improve the quality of service.
Reliability factor
Parasuraman, who has pioneered the SERVQUAL model of customer service evaluation, said customers rate reliability – consistently delivering the promises or expected service – as the most critical dimension under this model. Tangibles, empathy, responsiveness, assurance are the other dimensions of this model.
Though tangibles were least important for customers, many companies spend their resources on tangibles to improve their image, he said.
Madhu Veeraraghavan, Director of TAPMI, was present on the occasion.
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