Assessing SERVQUAL and the automotive service quality model: A comparative study.

摘要

The global economic climate currently faced by the housing credit crisis, the Wall Street financial downfall and vast industry consolidations, all requiring a government bailout, have severely affected the automotive industry as well. Despite a widespread belief that the automobile industry has greatly improved product quality within the last 20 years because of more stringent quality standards, the industry is still faced by consumer criticism for poor service delivery. The most widely used instrument to evaluate service quality, SERVQUAL, currently is widely acceptance by service providers in various industries as an effective tool to identify, create, and measure service, although it fails to address certain issues specific to the automotive industry's quest for quality improvement. In this study, a new instrument, Automobile Service Quality (ASQ) has been developed to measure automobile service quality that compares favorably with SERVQUAL. ASQ was designed to address specific issues of the automobile industry. Factor and regression analyses indicate that ASQ is a robust instrument that compares favorably with SERVQUAL, while addressing issues unique to the automotive industry. The results of the analyses suggested that the traditional SERVQUAL service quality model does not accurately measure automotive dealership service quality. Thus, ASQ demonstrated to be a better predictor of quality performance-based factors than SERVQUAL. This included new constructs that measure pre-service, concurrent and post-service activities.