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A Method for Evaluating Service Quality with Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Information

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Abstract

Service quality evaluation is vital to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the services provided by service organizations. In practical situations, because of customers’ inherent uncertainty and hesitancy, hesitant fuzzy linguistic information is often employed by customers to assess expected and perceived services. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel method for evaluating service quality based on the use of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS). In this method, customers’ comparative linguistic expressions concerning the expected service, perceived service, and attribute weights are transformed into HFLTS. By using a transformation formula, HFLTS are expressed as trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Then, based on Gap 5 of the Parasuraman Zeithaml Berry service quality model, calculation formulas and a related theoretical analysis of the discrepancy degree between fuzzy perceived service and expected service are given. A fuzzy evaluation result for each dimension is determined by aggregating the discrepancy degrees of customers with respect to all attributes in the same dimension. Furthermore, a linguistic evaluation result for each dimension is achieved by calculating and comparing the similarity degrees between the fuzzy evaluation result and the predefined linguistic variables. On this basis, an overall service quality evaluation result is determined by aggregating the evaluation results for all dimensions. Finally, an example is used to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor-in-chief and the anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions that led to an improved version of this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 71201109, 71571039, 71771043 and 71671117), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (Project No. 2014M551113), the Doctoral Start-up Foundation of Liaoning Province in China (Project No. 20141089), the Program for Liaoning Excellent Talents in University in China (Project No. LJQ2014024) and the Liaoning Bai QianWan Talents Program (Liaoning baiqianwan Project No. 2015[52]).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management and Information System, School of Economics and Management, Shenyang Ligong University, Shenyang, 110159, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China

    Hao Xu

  2. Shenyang Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110168, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China

    Hao Xu

  3. Department of Information Management and Decision Sciences, School of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110167, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China

    Zhi-Ping Fan & Yang Liu

  4. Department of Business Administration, School of Economics and Management, Yantai University, Yantai, 264005, Shandong, People’s Republic of China

    Wu-Liang Peng

  5. Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Management, Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang, 110870, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China

    Yin-Yun Yu

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  1. Hao Xu
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Correspondence to Zhi-Ping Fan.

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Xu, H., Fan, ZP., Liu, Y. et al. A Method for Evaluating Service Quality with Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Information. Int. J. Fuzzy Syst. 20, 1523–1538 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-018-0476-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-018-0476-5

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