Mapping Out Marketing

ENTRY #35     How do you measure service quality?

Valarie A. Zeithaml

The David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Although researchers and companies in the era of quality were eager to find ways to measure service quality, insufficient research had been conducted to begin measurement. When Parsu Parasuraman, Len Berry and I began our work on service quality, very little literature existed. Early writing on the topic of consumer perceptions suggested that service quality results from a comparison of what customers feel a service provider should offer (i.e., their expectations) with how the ...