Service Quality Gaps & Six Sigma

Abstract

Nowadays almost all organizations are realizing the significance of customer centered philosophies. One of the key challenges they are facing is how to manage service quality, which holds a great importance to customer satisfaction. This paper has attempted to investigate the gap between customers, service providers and managers in terms of service quality dimensions.  For this purpose, gaps 1 and 6 of the SERVQUAL model have been studied, as well as two new gaps, proposed for comparing customer perceptions and employee perceptions of customer perceptions.  Service quality dimensions have been analyzed, considering a case study in Customer Centric Group Company (CCG Co).  The empirical data has been gathered through in dept interviews.  The role of Six Sigma has also been investigated in this paper and it has been highlighted that how such advanced quality engineering approach could tighten service quality gaps.  The results imply that among studied service quality dimensions, assurance has the highest gap and tangible has the lowest.  Additionally, it has been found that Six Sigma might not have a direct impact on service quality gaps, rather it affect them indirectly through customer satisfaction, i.e. customer perceptions.