Tangibles: Physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.

Reliability: Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.

Responsiveness: Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.

Assurance: (Including competence, courtesy, credibility and security) Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence.

Empathy: Including access, communication understanding the customer caring and individualized attention that the firm provides to its customers.

How to manage knowledge gained in serving the customers? And how this should effectively be utilized to train new inducts so that service quality is unaffected and remains unchanged in the perceptions of the customers inspite of new recruits?

Core Issues

The main difference between services and manufacturing is that in service delivery, the main factor used is specialized labor instead of machines. Due to this very reason, expectation of standardization or exact replication of the delivery is completely utopian. Also, as it happens in manufacturing, most of the key performance indicators of quality are quantifiable, whereas in services, it might be difficult to objectively do so if not impossible. So, how do we ensure the uniformity in service delivery to the customer? How do we introduce element of tangibility and, hence, measurability in the quality management?

These are a few questions that need to be answered if we are to solve the puzzle of the service quality measurement as glibly as it happens in manufacturing. As we will see in subsequent sections that how uncertainty regarding the services’ quality definition and measurement can be reduced naturally with six sigma method of improvement.

Next

* Contributed by: -
Jinesh Kothari & Abhishek Raghuvanshi,
FPM-32,
IIM Lucknow.