A Method for Evaluating Service Quality with Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Information

Abstract

Service quality evaluation is vital to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the services provided by service organizations. In practical situations, because of customers’ inherent uncertainty and hesitancy, hesitant fuzzy linguistic information is often employed by customers to assess expected and perceived services. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel method for evaluating service quality based on the use of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS). In this method, customers’ comparative linguistic expressions concerning the expected service, perceived service, and attribute weights are transformed into HFLTS. By using a transformation formula, HFLTS are expressed as trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Then, based on Gap 5 of the Parasuraman Zeithaml Berry service quality model, calculation formulas and a related theoretical analysis of the discrepancy degree between fuzzy perceived service and expected service are given. A fuzzy evaluation result for each dimension is determined by aggregating the discrepancy degrees of customers with respect to all attributes in the same dimension. Furthermore, a linguistic evaluation result for each dimension is achieved by calculating and comparing the similarity degrees between the fuzzy evaluation result and the predefined linguistic variables. On this basis, an overall service quality evaluation result is determined by aggregating the evaluation results for all dimensions. Finally, an example is used to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.