A Novel Approach Based on Performance Influence for Evaluating Criteria of Service Quality

Service quality is becoming increasingly important, largely determining whether customers patronize a company. However, each customer has a particular level of demand for a service, which requires that companies provide services with diverse characteristics to satisfy the needs of customers. This shows that customer satisfaction is the overall appraisal of companies, performed by customers after experiencing the services. Thus, to improve service quality, companies first understand the influence between individual satisfaction and overall satisfaction. Based on this concept, this study employees the SERVQUAL questionnaire to gauge the satisfaction of customers toward individual service items as well as their overall satisfaction and constructed a performance influence matrix to evaluate poor service performance. We further proposed a priority improvement evaluation index to confirm critical issues affecting service quality. Our proposed approach can aid companies to improve service quality effectively. Managers can also achieve the objective of management and development by understanding evaluation index. A case study involving a long-term care institution is discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in practice.