Service Quality Comparison

Abstract

In studying the service quality of a service provider, customers are often asked to rate the services they have received through a questionnaire. Based on the responses received, various models/techniques that analyze the scores of different components have been proposed to evaluate overall service quality. In particular, the average score of a service provider often serves as a basis for comparison between two or more service providers. In practice, the scores associated with each response level (e.g., agree, strongly agree) are often based on intuition or some simple rule, which may not correctly reflect the differences between different response levels. Therefore, it is important to examine the robustness of a conclusion (e.g., service provider A is better than service provider B) with respect to changes in the scores assigned to each response level when studying the service quality of service providers through customer surveys. It is commonly assumed that the difference between the average scores of two service providers provides a good indication of the robustness of the conclusion. In this paper, we illustrate that this may not be true and highlight that a separate analysis on the robustness of a conclusion is necessary. We describe how the robustness of a conclusion can be represented and show how it can be computed in practice.