Quality perceptions of internal and external customers: a case study in educational administration

Abstract

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.

Quality gap of educational services at Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Iran

“…This finding is similar to some studies 17,21,22 whereas is not consistent with some other studies 15,[23][24][25] . Students' views clearly show that responsiveness, empathy and assurance are the three most critical dimensions of educational services.…”

“…The SERVQUAL model consists of 22 items regarding service attributes, which are grouped along five dimensions. This framework has been extensively used and tested across a wide range of public and private sector services 15 , and was therefore chosen as the framework for the research.…”

“…Research into service quality as perceived by students and faculty members in a higher educational context is somewhat scant 1,15 and as far as we are aware, none of them has addressed the specific context of medical higher education in Iran. Within this context, the goal of the study was to determine: a) the level of quality gap perceived by faculty and students and b) the differences, if any, between the viewpoints of two groups.…”

Quality Gap of Family Health Care Services in Kashan Health Centers: An Iranian Viewpoint

“…The questionnaire was designed based on SERVQUAL scale -developed by Parasuraman et al (1985) -that is a well-known construction for measuring quality of service in a range of service settings [21]. SERVQUAL is widely used within customer oriented organizations in both private and public settings [22], and was thus selected for this study. This measure includes 22 items about service features that can be viewed in terms of five underlying dimensions, (1) tangibles, i.e.…”

Toward Understanding Conflicts Between Customers and Employees’ Perceptions and Expectations: Evidence of Iranian Bank

“…• discount and department stores (Finn and Lamb 1991;Daholbkar et al 1996;Stank et al 1999;Miguel et al 2004;Siu and Cheung 2001), • hotel industry (Lewis 1987;Nash 1988;Barsky 1992;Tsang and Qu 2000;Wilkins et al 2007), • hospital industry and healthcare (Babakus and Mangold 1992;Youseff et al 1996;Pagouni 1997;Sewell 1997;Camilleri and O'Callaghan 1998), • education and university (Hill 1995;Galloway 1998;Orwig and Jauch 1999;Waugh 2002 • public sectors and services (Donnelly and Dalrymple 1996;Orwig et al 1997;Brysland and Curry 2001;Wisniewski 2001), • local government (Donnelly et al 1995), and • banking industry (Avkiran 1994;Newman and Cowling 1996;Angur et al 1999;Lasser et al 2000;Blanchard and Galloway 1994;Allred 2000;Allred and Addams 2000;Allred 2001;Mihelis et al 2001;Aldlaigan and Buttle 2002;Anvary Rostamy et al 2005). …”