What is Service Quality, and How Can it be Measured?

By far the biggest asset to any business is, and will always be, its customers. But the only way to turn a one-time purchaser into a loyal, repeat customer is to offer exceptional service quality. You should be aiming for the type of experience that your competitors simply cannot match.

Service quality definition

Overall, service quality is all about understanding the current position someone is on in the buyer’s journey so that you can zero in on the experience and improve it as much as possible. People are willing to pay more for a quality experience — and a little bit of effort at this stage makes them far more likely to become repeat customers as well. High-quality experiences make customers more likely to recommend your brand to friends and family members.

Common questions related to service quality

Of course, the definition of “excellent” service quality will vary depending on the type of business in question. A satisfied customer in retail may have wildly different expectations when compared to someone having bodywork performed on their car. Yet, there are a few questions that must be answered for each experience:

• What does the customer like? What are their baseline expectations when interacting with a business in this industry?
• What do they dislike? What has influenced negative interactions they’ve had in the past, and why?
• How can things be improved? How do you take what is already working and expand upon it?
• Are their needs and expectations being met? Is your brand living up to the main promise you made to the customer in the first place?
• How much will they pay for something? Are your products or services priced accurately, or are you charging more than they’re ultimately worth?

Benefits of measuring service quality

Measuring service quality is beneficial for a number of reasons, as it:

• Boosts the relationship between a customer and your brand
• Helps develop a wealth of data over time that can encourage better and more informed decision-making
• Improves brand reputation

What is SERVQUAL?

The SERVQUAL (or RATER) model is one of the original research tools used to collect information about customer expectations and perceptions, all in a way that helps paint a clearer picture about the current status of service quality and where it needs to be headed. It helps businesses better understand what people expect of them so that they can make meaningful efforts to meet or exceed those expectations moving forward.

SERVQUAL dimensions

There are five total dimensions of SERVQUAL, which include the following:

• Reliability: how dependably and accurately your products or services perform
• Assurance: the knowledge and helpfulness (not to mention the kindness) of your employees
• Tangibles: the appearance of your business, be it a physical storefront, the way your employees look and communicate, and more
• Empathy: the level of care and attention provided to individual customers
• Responsiveness: how willing employees are to help when customers have issues

SERVQUAL questionnaire

One ideal way to measure service quality is through the SERVQUAL questionnaire — a resource that allows you to measure both customer loyalty and satisfaction equally.

While it’s absolutely true that achieving customer loyalty is usually the goal of the marketing department, maintaining that loyalty requires an “all hands on deck” approach. True loyalty is the correlation between consumer sentiment, the purchasing behaviors of your target audience, and the benefit that you provide that other organizations cannot. The SERVQUAL questionnaire is built to provide you the insight necessary to accomplish all of this, all in one fell swoop.

Other tips for measuring service quality

Follow-up surveys

Follow-up surveys can help track the customer experience that a person is having over time.

In theory, if you’re truly listening to customer feedback, the quality of that experience should increase over a given period. With the right follow-up survey, when properly timed, you can verify which of your efforts are working and which ones are not. Customer incentives play a big role in this because you don’t just want someone to give you their feedback — you want them to give it to you as often as they’re willing to.

Social listening

The idea of social listening is also a significant part of the service quality improvement process. Right now, people are talking about your brand on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Monitoring the types of conversations that people are already having can provide valuable insight into the right direction your brand should take moving forward. If nothing else, it can also help illustrate where your shortcomings are — which can help you correct them in the short-term and avoid them again in the long-term.

Measure Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score, otherwise known as CES, is a metric that tracks how much effort someone has to go through to resolve an action. Maybe they’re trying to solve a problem, maybe they’re trying to answer a question — it doesn’t matter. The point is that it should be as easy for them to accomplish their goal as possible.

How to turn your service quality measurements into action

In the end, it’s important to remember that service quality measurement data means nothing if you’re not in a position to act on it. Yes, it’s valuable to see trends and patterns that otherwise would have gone undiscovered — but value is lost if you don’t use that information to make more accurate decisions than ever before. That’s precisely why these types of tools are so important — they allow you to see the “bigger picture” so that you can think sharper, act faster and make more strategic choices than your competitors.

Ultimately, identifying correlations between the customer experience and brand sentiment is paramount if for no other reason than to make sure that the company you’re trying to build is the one that your target audience actually perceives it to be.