Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of multiple- criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques used in the assessment of service qual- ity. This study reviewed a total of 79 articles from 51 journals, published from 2001 to 2015. Articles were classified into 10 application areas and scopes. Furthermore, articles were categorised based on an author, year, application area, the nationality of the author, technique, a number of criteria, research purpose, gap and research problem, results and outcome. The best criteria were determined in each article. The results of this study re- vealed that more papers on MCDM were published in 2011 than in any other year. Inte- grated techniques, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy AHP methods, were ranked as first and second methods in use, respectively. Finally, the airline industry was ranked as the first application area, in which previous studies applied MCDM techniques for the evaluation of the service quality. This research contributes to the existing literature on the service quality and MCDM. The research outputs are valuable to academics scholars and leaders of organisations and industries in the field of service quality evaluation.
Highlights
The steadily growing amount of literature on service quality covers a variety of interpretations and implementations
According to the results provided in this table, previous studies used multiplecriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques and approaches for the airlines industry, which is the focus of 18 articles; website and Internet services – 16 articles; the tourism and hospitality industry – 13 articles; the healthcare industry – 7 articles; other transportation industries – 5 articles; manufacturing industry – 5 articles; banking, education and service industries – 4 articles; and other areas – 3 articles
This study attempted to categorise these papers into 10 application areas and scopes: (1) the airline industry, (2) websites and Internet services, (3) the tourism and hospitality industry, (4) the healthcare industry, (5) other transportation industries, (6) the manufacturing industry, (7) the banking sector, (8) the education sector, (9) service organisations, and (10) other application areas
Summary
The steadily growing amount of literature on service quality covers a variety of interpretations and implementations. At the time of decision making, decision makers attempt to select the best solution. A truly best solution can be obtained from a single criterion, which is taken into consideration. MCDM is applied in situations, which have contradictory criteria to help individuals make decisions in accordance with their preference (Bogetoft, Pruzan 1997). The issue of service quality can be measured according to different qualitative and quantitative criteria; the MCDM techniques are appropriate for the assessment of expected service quality. There are many ways to measure the service quality, such as statistical approaches, analysis of multicriteria satisfaction for benchmarking, AHP, VIKOR (VIsekriterijumska optimizacija i KOmpromisno Resenje), fuzzy AHP, Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)
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