SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer ...

1 Volume 64 Number 1 Spring 1988 SERVQUAL: AMultiple-Item Scale forMeasuring ConsumerPerceptions ofService QualityA. PARASURAMAN VALARIE A. ZEITHAMLF oley's/Federated Professor of retailing Associate Professorand Marketing Studies of MarketingTexas A & M University Duke UniversityCollege Station, Texas Raleigh-Durham, N. CarolinaLEONARD L. BERRYF oley's/Federated Professor of Retailingand Marketing StudiesTexas A & M UniversityCollege Station, TexasThis paper describes the development of a 22-item instrument (calledSERVQUAL) for assessing customer perceptions of service quality inservice and retailing organizations.

2 After a discussion of the conceptu-alization and operationalization of the service quality construct, theprocedures used in constructing and refining a Multiple-Item Scale tomeasure the construct are described. Evidence of the Scale 's reli-ability, factor structure, and validity on the basis of analyzing datafrom four independent samples is presented next. The paper concludeswith a discussion of potential applications of the competition and rapid deregulation have led many serviceand retail businesses to seek profitable ways to differentiate strategy that has been related to success in these businesses is thedelivery of high service quality (Rudie and Wansley 1985; Thompson,The research reported in this article was made possible by a grant from the MarketingScience Institute, Cambridge, Journal of RetailingSERVQUALDeSouza, and Gale 1985).

3 Delivering superior service quality appears tobe a prerequisite for success, if not survival, of such businesses in the1980s and goods quality, which can be measured objectively by such indi-cators as durability and number of defects (Crosby 1979; Garvin 1983),service quality is an abstract and elusive construct because of three fea-tures unique to services: intangibility, heterogeneity, and inseparability ofproduction and consumption (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1985). Inthe absence of objective measures, an appropriate approach for assessingthe quality of a firm's service is to measure consumers' perceptions ofquality. As yet, however, no quantitative yardstick is available forgauging these purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to describe the development ofa Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring service quality (called SERVQUAL)and (2) to discuss the Scale 's properties and potential applications.

4 Thebasic steps employed in constructing the Scale closely parallel proceduresrecommended in Churchill's (1979) paradigm for developing better mea-sures of marketing constructs. Figure 1 provides an overview of the article is divided into five sections. The first section delimits thedomain of the service-quality construct and describes the generation ofscale items (Steps 1,2, and 3 in Figure t). The second section presents thedata-collection and Scale -purification procedures (Steps 4 through 9),while the third section provides an evaluation of the Scale 's reliability andfactor structure (Step 10). The next section deals with assessment of thescale's validity (Step 11). The final section discusses potential applica-tions of the OF THE SERVICE-QUALITY CONSTRUCTIn deploring the inadequacy of measurement procedures used in themarketing discipline Jacoby (1978) wrote:Many of our measures are developed at the whim of a re-searcher with nary a thought given to whether or not it ismeaningfully related to an explicit conceptual statement of thephenomena or variable in question.

5 In most instances, ourconcepts have no identity apart from the instrument or proce-dures used to measure them. (p. 92)The need for Scale development to be preceded by, and rooted in, a soundconceptual specification of the construct being scaled has been empha-sized by other scholars as well ( , Churchill 1979; Peter 1981). The13 Journal of RetailingHGURE 1 Summary of Steps Employed in Developing theService-Quality ScaleStep 1: DelJnition ol service quality as the discrepancy beiweer*consumers' pefceplions ol services oflered by a particular lirm anditieir expectations about lirms oflering such 2: Idenlificaiion ol lO dimensions making up Ihe domain of Iheservice-quality 3: Generation of 97 items representing the 10 dirronsions, IIESfp 4: Collection ol expectations and perceptions data from asample of 200 respondents, each ol whom was a current or receniuser ol one ol the following services: banking, credit card, appli-ance repair or mainienance, long-distance telephone, and secur-ities 5.

6 Scale purification ihrough the lollowing ileraiive sequence:Computation ol coefficient alptia andilem-to-total correlations lor each of items whose Item-to-totalcorrelations were low and whose re-nx)val increased coellicient analysis to verily the dimen-sionality ol the overall of items and restruc-turing of dimensions where r>eces-sary. ^^_^_Step 6: Identification of 34 items representing 7 7: Collection of expectations and perceptions data (using the34-item instrument) from four independent samples ol 200 respon-dents (each sample contained current or recent customers of a na-tionally known firm in one ol the following lour service sectors:banking, credit card, appliance repair and maintenance, and long-distance telephone).

7 J_Step 8: Evaluation anu I'unr^r purilication nt the 34-item Scale byusing the same iterative sequence as in Step 5 on each of the fourdata sets,Step 9: Identification of a more("SERVQtJAL") representing five , 22-ilem scaleStep 10: Evaluation of SERVOUAL's reliability and factor structureand reanalysis of the original data (collected in Step 4) pertaining tothe 22 items, lo verily the Scale 's internal consistency and 11: Assessment ol SERVOUAL's foundation for the SERVQUAL Scale was derived from theworks of a handful of researchers who have examined the meaning ofservice quality (Sasser, Olsen, and Wyckoff 1978; Gronroos 1982; Leh-tinen and Lehtinen 1982) and from a comprehensive qualitative researchstudy that defined service quality and illuminated the dimensions alongwhich consumers perceive and evaluate service quality (Parasuraman,Zeithaml, and Berry 1985).

8 Conceptualization of Service QualityThe construct of quality as conceptualized in the services literature andas measured by SERVQUAL, the Scale that is the focus of this article,involves perceived quality. Perceived quality is the Consumer 's judgmentabout an entity's overall excellence or superiority (Zeithaml 1987). Itdiffers from objective quality (as defined by, for example, Garvin 1983and Hjorth-Anderson 1984); it is a form of attitude, related but not equiva-lent to satisfaction, and results from a comparison of expectations withperceptions of quality versus objective quality. Researchers (Garvin 1983;Dodds and Monroe 1984; Holbrook and Corfman 1985; Jacoby and Olson1985; Zeithaml 1987) have emphasized the difference between objectiveand perceived quality.

9 Holbrook and Corfman (1985), for example, notethat consumers do not use the term quality in the same way as researchersand marketers, who define it conceptually. The conceptual meaning dis-tinguishes between mechanistic and humanistic quality: "mechanistic(quality) involves an objective aspect or feature of a thing or event; hu-manistic (quality) involves the subjective response of people to objects andis therefore a highly relativistic phenomenon that differs between judges"(Holbrook and Corfman 1985, p. 33). Garvin (1983) discusses five ap-proaches to defining quality, including two (product-based and manufac-turing-based) that refer to objective quality and one (user-based) that par-allels perceived as attitude.

10 Olshavsky (1985) views quality as a form ofoverall evaluation of a product, similar in many ways to attitude. Hol-brook concurs, suggesting that quality acts as a relatively global valuejudgment. Exploratory research conducted by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, andBerry (1985) supports the notion that service quality is an overall evalua-tion similar to attitude. The researchers conducted a total of twelve focusgroup interviews with current or recent consumers of four different ser-vices retail banking, credit card, securities brokerage, and product re-pair and maintenance. The discussions centered on issues such as the15 Journal of Retailingmeaning of quality in the context of the service in question, the character-istics the service and its provider should possess in order to project a high-quality image, and the criteria customers use in evaluating service of the findings from the focus groups revealed that, regardlessof the type of service, customers used basically the same general criteria inarriving at an evaluative judgement about service versus satisfaction.