Service Quality Of Company Research Articles

Evolution of insurance company service quality survey, using self-learning neural network

The objective of the paper is to demonstrate the abilities and possible approaches to classification of set of objects using self-organizing maps. As the objects, clients of an insurance company that made an agreement regarding mandatory insurance of motor vehicles were selected. The opinions of the clients and their overall satisfaction reflected in responses to presented answers. The clients were classified into three groups. The first two contained satisfied clients (i.e. good clients for the company), the last group contained clients that could potentially switch to the competitors. Subsequent analysis enabled discovering the reasons of low customer satisfaction and critical factors of losing the least satisfied clients. For the analysis of the responses (one hundred fifty-one) and the insurance company, experimental model of self-organizing map realized at the Department of informatics was used. Used experimental model has proved very effective software tool.

Reframing the past: A new approach in service quality assessment

The development of new approaches for assessing service quality is a priority for both managers and scholars. Until now, the most widely used tool for evaluating service quality is the SERVQUAL. It is based on a disconfirmation pattern, according to which service quality depends on measures of gaps between customer expected and perceived quality; the gaps come from the answers provided to a questionnaire representing fixed quality dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy). Notwithstanding its widespread application, the SERVQUAL has been theoretically and operationally criticised for the invariance of its dimensions across contexts. In contrast to the SERVQUAL and to other unchangeable techniques proposed in previous quality management researches, in this article, we propose a methodology able to assess service quality by means of firm-specific quality dimensions. Particularly, employees’ knowledge is exploited to collect the critical success factors (CSFs) of a company; subsequently, the measurement and management of a company service quality is performed by gathering customer expectations and perceptions, according to the collected CSFs. Total quality management (TQM) has, from long ago, established procedures for managing customer perceived quality but, in this study, an application for overcoming the lack of a systematical implementation of employee knowledge in TQM practices is proposed. This research is explorative in nature and a statistical support for our methodology is provided by an exploratory factor analysis. The results confirm that employees are able to gather quality dimensions customers value and that these dimensions can be successfully employed into a flexible tool for assessing and managing service quality. Moreover, according to the proposed methodology, the evaluation of service quality may change as well as CSFs of a company change; finally, managers may support TQM of a company by monitoring its provided quality on the basis of CSFs.

The study on the social network service quality of companies in Mobile Environment

The study on the social network service quality of companies in Mobile Environment

Corporate social responsibility for sustainable service dominant logic

This is a summary of the author’s PhD Thesis, supervised by Professor Bo Enquist, and defended on April 28, 2010 at Service Research Centre -CTF- of the Karlstad University. This thesis examines how social responsibility and customers’ value-creation influence the overall service quality of companies in developing a sustainable service business. It finds its stimulation from the research in sustainable development – corporate social responsibility (CSR), service research and quality management. The thesis amalgamates sustainability thinking and the service dominant logic. Adding Service- Dominant Logic (S-D logic) and Value creation have expanded the values based approach of corporate social responsibility. Adding CSR to S-D logic and value co-creation have expanded the management thinking and have a capacity to inspire the prevailing Business practice and service quality (SQ) improvement. This thesis is a compilation of five different papers that follow an interpretative case study approach.

Does Customer Knowledge Affect How Loyalty is Formed?

The authors first propose and test a cognitive-affective-conative baseline model: Perceived service quality (both tangible company-related and employee-related factors) is modeled antecedent to satisfaction and trust, which in turn are antecedents to customer loyalty responses (word of mouth and traditional loyalty). These relationships are then hypothesized to be moderated by high versus low knowledge, a moderation based on central versus peripheral processing. The results show that employee service quality has a greater impact than company service quality on trust and on satisfaction in both knowledge groups. The relationship of trust to word of mouth is both direct and indirect through satisfaction for both knowledge groups, but the relationship of trust to loyalty is both direct and indirect through satisfaction only for the high-knowledge group; for the low-knowledge group, the relationship of trust to loyalty is indirect only, through satisfaction.