SERVQUAL and SERVPERF: A Review of Measures in Services Marketing Research

Abstract

In India, the service sector has assumed greater economic importance over the past decade and enjoys the largest share in GDP. Banking and financial services, being an important part of service sector, are facing critical challenges to compete with the international players while satisfying customers by offering quality services. As delivering quality service to customers is a must for success, it needs to be continuously evaluated. Extant literature on the subject supports the contention that SERVQUAL and SERVPERF are the two most prominent scales forming the genesis for service quality assessment in different service sectors. Present paper attempts to present a review of the above mentioned two scales in an elucidative, concise and thoroughly documented manner. It also tries to posit the best approach of evaluating service quality in a more efficient and valid method for marketing managers/researchers in Indian context. Literature shows that in Indian context, SERVPERF has outperformed SERVQUAL as it not only cut down the number of variables but also reduced the work load of customer survey and helped in generating unbiased responses. Thus, from a pragmatic viewpoint, it is expected that the paper will serve as a useful of source information for researchers interested in selecting the most efficient service quality scale for assessing service quality in a developing economy like India as also solving complex issues related to service quality and other beha-vioural outcomes such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, recommendation, trust, word-of-mouth etc. in their future researches.