Healthcare is one of India’s largest sectors, in terms of revenue and employment, and one can well witness the sector to expand rapidly. With the fast growing purchasing power, Indian patients are willing to pay more to avail health care services of international standard. In the era of globalization and heightened competition, it has been observed that delivery of quality service is imperative for Indian healthcare providers to satisfy their indoor as well as outdoor patients. Hence, it is essential to be aware of how the patients and patient parties evaluate the quality of health care service. Such an understanding facilitates hospital administration to enhance quality of service and satisfy patients to a great extent as well. SERVQUAL instrument among several tools of measuring service quality and patient satisfaction is the most widely used tool. This paper focuses on the measurement of patient satisfaction in the light of service quality provided by hospitals. In this regard, a review of literature on the application of SERVQUAL model has been considered to investigate the relevance of the same in measuring patient satisfaction in health care sector in today’s competitive environment. On the basis of literature review from secondary sources, the layout of this paper would appear as follows: • Importance of customer satisfaction in service sector • Understanding the concept of patient satisfaction • Analyzing the notion of patient satisfaction as a subset of customer satisfaction • Study of patient satisfaction as a tool for measurement of service quality • Delineating the significance of SERVQUAL model • Drawing the criticisms associated with the SERVQUAL approach to patient satisfaction measurement The paper would end with a clear estimation of the modifications as well as the applicability of the SERVQUAL Model. Based on the platform of secondary literature review, the paper would be a move to outline and unveil the justification of measurement of patient satisfaction in the SERVQUAL way.

Measuring consumer satisfaction in health care sector: the applicability of servqual

The paper addresses two common questions relating to the use of students' feedback reports as valid measures of teaching effectiveness and improvement of teaching quality. A SERVQUAL-type approach to prioritise quality parameters has also been adopted. The role of statistics and quality professionals has been elaborated. Scope for further research about rating instruments and other forms of students' input has been recommended.

Assessing students' rating in higher education: A SERVQUAL approach

The study aims to contribute to the research on service quality, analyzing almost 30 years of research on the Gaps Model proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in the 1980s. A literature review has been conducted from 1985 to 2013 with the purpose of underlining the model evolution and its criticisms. Major international academic databases have been consulted. On this basis the paper summarizes some theoretical-conceptual and methodological-operational critical aspects identified by scholars who analyzed and applied the model and the scale. Despite that, the Gaps Model and the SERVQUAL scale are still the most used instruments to study service quality in marketing literature. The analysis allows to identify interesting points for future research on the topic of service quality. The conceptual framework presented in the paper does not include any empirical research that could be eventually implemented to validate the findings.

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A Review of Literature on the Gaps Model on Service Quality: A 3-Decades Period: 1985-2013

Vilfredo Pareto established the ‘Pareto principle’, which is also known as ‘vital few, trivial many’, to help in identifying ‘vital few’ errors for problem-solving. However, in many industrial applications, issues such as (a) the incorrect selection of the ‘vital few’ errors, (b) the interrelationship among errors and (c) the merging-up errors of different processes together need to be addressed. Otherwise, the chances are pretty high that the application of Pareto analysis will fail to correctly identify the ‘vital few’ errors, leading to an incorrect problem-solving approach. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the issues with the help of a real-life case study in a service scenario and suggest the appropriate remedial measures, for effectively separating out the ‘vital few’ causes from the ‘trivial or useful many’ causes to enhance the discriminating power of the Pareto graph.

Issues in Pareto analysis and their resolution

Service quality is a concept that has aroused considerable interest and debate in the research literature because of the difficulties in both defining and measuring it with no overall consensus emerging on either. Customer satisfaction and service quality are often treated together as functions of customerâ€™s perceptions and expectations and research has shown that high service quality contribute significantly to profitability. Service quality is required to be first measured in order to improve the quality in a service organization. Practitioners and academics are eager on measuring service quality accurately in order to have better understanding of its indispensable antecedent and consequences, and eventually ascertain methods for improving and measuring service quality in search for competitive advantage. The aim of this study is to rank the dimensions of service quality that affect the customersâ€™ expectation in online purchasing in Iran from the customersâ€™ perspective. A questionnaire used in this study was published in Cloob.com which is an Iranian virtual society website. The measurements used were based on the widely accepted SERVQUAL model which is the most common method for measuring service quality. A descriptive statistics analysis was used to evaluate the level of service quality of Iranianâ€™s online shops from the customersâ€™ perspective. This study also examined the service quality gap by comparing customersâ€™ expectations and their actual perceptions. The results of the study indicated that all of the service quality factors are important. The â€œAccess is fastâ€? is the most important factor among the others and respondents are not satisfied with current connection speed although they are fine with extra services. Tangibility was rated as the most important dimension followed by assurance, reliability, responsiveness, and empathy.

Measuring service quality using SERVQUAL model : a case study of e-retailing in Iran

The importance attributed to service sector industries has become more pronounced in the post-globalization era and the trend continues unabated even today. In such industries, direct assessment of the service quality is often not possible and the measurement has to be made in terms of suitable surrogates through various parameters related to delivery, support, cost, billing, access, speed, response to queries, complaint redressal and so on. The SERVQUAL models and their extensions (Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988, 1994a, 1994b; Zeithamal et al., 1993) have delved into the various facets of measuring service quality and the factors that influence the customer expectations and their perceptions. However, a concrete quantification of the ‘service gaps’ used in such models, is seldom found in the literature. As such, it is very much necessary to quantify the ‘service gaps’ and also to quantify the expectation of the service parameters as perceived by the customers. In the present paper, a prioritizat...

Prioritization of service quality parameters based on ordinal responses

The plant ‘Heat Rate’ (HR) is a measure of overall efficiency of a thermal power generating system. It depends on a large number of factors, some of which are non-measurable, while data relating to others are seldom available and recorded. However, coal quality (expressed in terms of ‘effective heat value’ (EHV) as kcal/kg) transpires to be one of the important factors that influences HR values and data on EHV are available in any thermal power generating system. In the present work, we propose a prediction interval of the HR values on the basis of only EHV, keeping in mind that coal quality is one of the important (but not the only) factors that have a pronounced effect on the combustion process and hence on HR. The underlying theory borrows the idea of providing simultaneous confidence interval (SCI) to the coefficients of a p-th p(≥1) order autoregressive model (AR(p)). The theory has been substantiated with the help of real life data from a power utility (after suitable base and scale transfo...

Sudipta Chatterjee

Papers

Prioritization of service quality parameters based on ordinal responses

Towards Enhancement of the Economy of a Thermal Power Generating System through Prediction of Plant Efficiency