Service Quality Assessment of Retail Pharmacies in Balingasag, Misamis Oriental Based on Hybrid AHP-RSQ Model

Abstract

The number of retail pharmacies in Balingasag, Misamis Oriental have increased due to the promising economic development of the municipality. Despite customers having wide alternative options to choose, service quality-implementation by respective pharmacies have perhaps executed inconsistently leading to a poor outlook of the stores service. The main objective of this study is to assess the service quality and performance efficiency of pharmacies surrounding the central area of the municipality of Balingasag using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). We discuss in this paper the analysis of criterion prioritization through expert judgments, identify retail pharmacies with high and low performance efficiency of service quality. Criteria considered in formulating the AHP architecture is based on the retail service quality scale of Dabholkar et al. (1996) including workplace hygiene, understanding, accessibility, reliability, guidance, policy, and problem – solving. Based on experts’ judgments using pairwise comparison, different performance indicators have been evaluated: the most prioritized criterion among the seven (7) criteria is ‘problem-solving’ with a criterion weight of 0.22 while the least prioritized criterion is ‘accessibility’ with a criterion weight of 0.05. Empirical evaluation integrated with the obtained criterion weights showed that among ten (10) retail pharmacies; nine (9) pharmacies have good performance quality, while the remaining pharmacy have an acceptable performance in service quality implementation. The result of this study gives emphasis that ‘problem-solving’ criterion in the implementation of service quality should be strengthened by retail pharmacies to subsequently improve its service quality performance and competitive positioning.