Social and political influences are increasing the importance of quality in the higher education (HE) sector as in other areas of public service. Quality is an elusive concept in most services, but it is particularly so in public service with the wide range of customers and stakeholders involved. Describes an exercise to measure perceived quality with two distinct customer groups, academic and technical staff and students, within the context of a university faculty office using a questionnaire developed from the SERVQUAL instrument. In common with other researchers, it is found that SERVQUAL does not give a good fit to the situation, and that expectation contributes nothing to the predictive value of the data. Significant differences in the factors determining perceived quality are found to exist between internal and external customers. It is suggested that the differences arise from the degree of dependence and frequency/length of contact between the service and the customer, and that this might be a more general phenomenon related not only to the internal/external divide, but to other customer characteristics in both public and private sectors.

Defining "quality" can be confusing. There are numerous possible interpretations, especially in the service sector. Despite this, quality is seen as a major factor in customer acquisition and retention. Describes a model of service quality based around operational issues, directly relevant to issues of staff skills and training; and based on three dimensions of outcome/process, hard/soft and objective/subjective, giving a total of eight service types. Developed from survey data and in-depth interviews with staff and customers carried out within retail banking, it is suggested that the operations orientation makes it universally acceptable. Concludes that the benefits to the organization from a correct match between staff skills and customer expectations include a higher and more consistent perceived quality by customers, and, very probably, a greater level of job satisfaction among staff.

A number of models of consumer behaviour, or of the influences on consumer behaviour, imply nonlinearity and non-reversibility. These include the order winning/qualifying criteria model from manufacturing strategy, and the satisfier/dissatisfier and zone of tolerance models from the field of service quality. This paper demonstrates that these models share a commonality with the physical sciences' hysteresis model, and that hysteresis can be used as a valid and informative model of a number of aspects of consumer behaviour. The application of this pre-existing model unifies a number of previously disparate and even contradictory elements and suggests a common pattern of behaviour over a wide range of activities. The implications of this for operations strategy, service quality and further research are discussed.

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