Assessment Item 2 - Individual essay
Service sector has been the major growth industry and service economy has been a major growth driver in many economies in late 20th Century. In 2009 services represented 76% of Australia's GDP and service industries employ 85% of Australian workers. Given the rapid growth of service industry, offering superior service quality is the most important issue to all service companies. Quality service has positive impacts on customer satisfactions, probability, customer loyalty competitive advantage. However, comparing to physical goods, quality of service is more difficult to manage due to the four unique characteristics - intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability. This essay will explain why the quality is important to services marketing and explain why quality is more difficult to manage in service industries than it is in the case of physical goods with some examples.
(Kotler et al, 2005) The meaning of quality is different between physical goods and service.
English: Gap model of Service Quality. বাং...
English: Variations in the Quality of Service acro...
English: Hicks & Son VW Service specialises in cla...It is variously defined as fitness for use, freedom from variation, conformance with requirements, and conformance to specifications in manufacturing perspective. In service perspective, there is a variety of definition of quality. According to Lewis and Boom, service quality is "a measure of how well the service level delivered matches customer expectations" (Baron and Harris, 2003). The meaning of service quality can be also divided into provider perspective and customer perspective. From provider perspective, "it is the degree to which the service's features conform to the organization's specifications and requirements". From customer perspective, it is define as "the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs" from customer perspective. (Kotler et al, 2005)
Quality is one of the main issues in management in this last decade of the Century (Bitner and Zeithaml,