Developing control charts in monitoring service quality based on the number of customer complaints

摘要

Because of the special characteristics such as intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability, monitoring service quality is very difficult. The environmental factors make customer expectations and perceptions changing fast and hence gauging it are and finding the gap between the customer expectation and realization of quality accurately is not so easy. The 10 dimensions of service quality proposed by Parasuraman et al. (Ref. 1) are reliability, responsiveness, competence, access, courtesy, communication, creditability, security, understanding, and tangibles and among them, five dimensions such as tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and tangibles are found to be of primary importance. Based on them, the SERVQUAL was proposed to evaluate service quality. The ratio of the number of complaints on the total number of customers is an index (p) of customer satisfaction as proposed by some other authors. Similarly the ratio of the difference between the proposed upper limit of complaints and the actual complaints on the upper limit of complaints is used as another index. This compares the complaints with the upper limit decided by the company but does not monitor the variations and trends in the complaints. Some authors have proposed control chart as a means to monitor service quality on a continuous basis. Base on this the information to focus on strategic planning of services can be done. This article proposes a theory-based service quality control chart based on the index proposed by Chen and Yang (Ref. 2). This model can help identifying rapid changes in service quality so that improvements can be carried out in the appropriate direction to satisfy customers. (23 refs.)