Service Quality

Service quality represents value judgments about results, impacts and outcomes of what organizations do or provide. These qualities might be intended by management in the form of a specification or standard, or they may be a subjective assessment by customers, clients, or other recipients of products or services. Subjective assessments are arrived at by comparing the service level expected from the organization with that which the organization is perceived to deliver.

Both definitions of service quality apply to various stages of organizational product or service production as well as the ultimate one(s). For example, a quality standard may have been determined by management, which specifies how welfare department clerks will relate to applicants for public assistance. However, there may be variance between behavior required by the standard and the client's perception of the clerk's behavior in this intermediate processing stage (rather than final service delivery). The client may also have a negative perception of an end result, such as one that denies public assistance. Service quality perceptions may be mixed, such as when a long wait for emergency room service results in a negative view of the service provider, although the actual service given by the physician, when it occurs, may be deemed excellent by the sick or injured person.

As previously mentioned, service quality is an element of organizational production functions. From an operational perspective, production functions include several elements of which quality is an important part. First, various inputs (e.g., money, human resources, materials) are applied to some conversion process (e.g., decision making, machinery, an entire program) to produce outputs (e.g., hour miles of police patrol, public policies, program services). Managementdeveloped quality standards may be applied at all of these stages. However, of considerable importance are those at the output and outcome stages. For example, a program of after-school tutoring might require an output of a fixed number of hours per student as a service-quality standard. Outcome measures are indicators of accomplishments or results. In the previous example, not only did the students have the set period of time for tutoring (the output standard), but a results standard might require that a specified percentage of students achieve a given skill-level gain in reading. [Page 872]Results can also include measures of public perceptions (e.g., timeliness, safety, and cleanliness of transit vehicles). Special studies might be conducted to help determine quality of results (e.g., public accessibility to transit measured as the size and distribution of populations being served).

Perceived positive or negative service quality can sometimes result in vigorous public reactions. For example, a major finding on the effect of citizen's service-quality perceptions was uncovered by a study in Eastern Europe, where survey research revealed that tax evasion is lowest among those who believe they are getting good quality government services for the taxes they pay.