A transformation function corresponding to IPA and gap analysis

Abstract

In today's world of fierce competition, rendering service quality is crucial for subsistence and success for its significant influence on customer satisfaction and loyalty to organisations. Given that, related research has expanded into the purview of both business and academia in recent years. To this purpose, identifying critical service attributes to improve overall quality under resource-limiting conditions has become absolutely necessary and importance-performance analysis (IPA) has been regarded as a simple and useful technique for this requirement. However, we argue that the defect of traditional IPA is the failure to take into account gap analysis as various authors reiterated that service quality is the degree of discrepancy between customers’ expectations and perceptions of the service. Therefore, this study has a transformation function which integrates IPA and gap analysis to substitute for the original ones to produce a revised matrix. Beside that, we further calculate the standardised distance from each attribute to this pivot to estimate the sub-priority of service attributes which were situated in the same quadrant. To verify the validity and the implementation of this modified model, a Taiwanese HR service agency case was then presented and effective action for each service quality attribute was also acquired.