An integrated approach for customer satisfaction — combining ISO 9000 QMS and PZB gap model

Abstract

Due to the intensive competition, the competence of an enterprise has focused on knowing customers, satisfying customers and continuous improvement. Under the emerging paradigm, to establish an effective and efficient quality system becomes a main issue for enterprises. Upon the 3rd revision, compared with the 1987 and 1994 versions, the ISO 9001:2000 Quality Management System (QMS) [1] becomes much more clearly emphasizing on implementing customer satisfaction for both manufacturing and service industries. Among the previous researches of the service industries, PZB (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry) Gap Model [2] is cited frequently as a tool to analyze and enhance customer satisfaction. This model suggested a quality improvement way through minimizing five kinds of gaps among customers’ expectations, service providers’ designs, service delivery, and customers’ perceptions after being served. The aim of this article is to combine the designed structure of ISO 9001:2000 QMS and the analysis flow of PZB Gap Model. Under the common goal and designed philosophy of applying customer requirement as an input and customer satisfaction as an output, we “build-in” the requirements of ISO 9001:2000 QMS into the five gaps of the PZB Gap Model. Result of the integrated model may be utilized as an effective and efficient tool to introduce and implement customer satisfaction objective. It can not only to help enterprises, both for the manufacturing and service industries, to satisfy or exceed the ultimate customer needs, but also to improve the processes among enterprises’ whole quality management system.