earticle

영어

During the 1980s, the interest in service quality has increased exponentially. Also, there now have been many conceptual articles written on service quality, and even a few empirical research results published. So, service quality has become a top priority and a significant competitive issue in many countries. Nowadays, service companies are being faced with three common tasks of improving quality of service, competitive differential advantage, and productivity due to quantitative expansion of service industries. Especially, service companies in Korea should prepare for starting of WTO which is a new world trade organization to cope with the new circumstances. The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding and exploring how service quality is perceived and measured by the customers. Service quality is viewed as the degree and direction of discrepancy between customer`s perceptions and expectations. A model of service quality by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry is presented and introduced in this paper. Especially, a multiple-item scale called SERVQUAL developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry has been used as a method of measurement. Two research questions are set forth and answered by testing three hypothesis using data collected by questionnaires in cross-sectional field study of service companies in Korea. The data were collected by questionnaire research through mail or interview with customer who has experienced to service companies (Bank, Hospital, Fastfood-Chain, Hotel). The analysis was carried to 528 samples for customer and 64 samples for service provider group by using SAS statistical package. The reliability test by Cronbach`s Alpha was conducted to examine the conceptual consistency used in questionnaire and the validity test by content analysis was used to confirm whether the concepts are appropriate to measure or not. Also, statistical methods such as factor analysis, T-test, simple regression analysis, multiple regression analysis and Pearson correlation analysis were used to test the hypothesis. The principal findings of the research and its significance are summarized as follows : First, the relationship between customer`s assessment of a service`s overall quality and the discrepancies between customer`s expectation service quality and perception service quality was found to be the opposite with the existence of a significant.. Second, it was found that there is a significant difference in the relative importance of service quality dimensions by types of service systems that was classified on customer contact and labor intensity suggested by Richard Chase and Dan Thomas. In conclusion, the implications of these findings and contributions made by this research is to confirm the usefulness of using service quality dimensions and expectation/perception gap analysis in management of service quality and identify the necessity of considering the different service system types as the variables of strategy for competitive advantage. In addition, the findings provide the basis for constructing of service operation management, service delivery systems and competitive advantage strategy by the analysis of the relationships among such variables as custmers` overall service quality, relative importance of quality dimensions.