Service Quality: Research Perspectives

Citation

Furrer, O. (2005), "Service Quality: Research Perspectives", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 408-410. https://doi.org/10.1108/09564230510614121

Service Quality: Research Perspectives by Benjamin Schneider and Susan S. White is not, as stated by David Bowen on the back cover of the book, “a ‘one‐minute’ guide for managers in search of alleged quick‐fixes of service quality”. The book is also not a textbook that would claim at covering all of the relevant literature on service quality. Furthermore, it is not a book designed to be used in case‐driven MBA classes. Service Quality: Research Perspectives is primarily written for students and scholars interested in research and theory. Based on 30 years of accumulated theory and research, the book discusses selected streams of thinking and research from a variety of disciplines, including marketing, organizational studies (industrial‐organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, and human resources management), and operations management. As mentioned by the authors, the aim of the book is to present how scholars from different academic backgrounds and perspectives approach and conduct research on service delivery: How do they think about service delivery? What are the key questions they address? How do they carry out their empirical research? What have they learned? This focused positioning makes the books a particularly interesting and insightful read.

Structure of the book

Service Quality: Research Perspectives is structured around five chapters. After a short introduction on what services are, what quality is, and why the study of service quality is important, Benjamin Schneider and Susan White present the framework which tight all the chapters of the book together. This framework looks at the relationships between internal service, work facilitation, climate for service, and customers' perception of service quality. It summarizes the whole philosophy of the book and represents the structure of the core of the book: chapter 2 is concerned with how service quality is defined and measured from the customers' view point; chapter 3 takes the point of view of systems and processes for the production and delivery of services; and chapter 4 the view point of the employees and the OB/HRM systems in which they work.

Content of the book

From a marketing perspective, chapter 2 focuses on the conceptualization and the measurement of service quality. In this chapter, Benjamin Schneider and Susan White briefly review earlier literature with a strong emphasis on Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry's research program. Several typologies of the dimensions of service quality are first presented before a discussion of the gap model and the role of customers' expectations in service quality. The authors then turn their attention to the concept of overall service quality and its link to customer satisfaction. The second part of the chapter deals with the issue of measuring service quality and review several techniques to do that, such as focus groups and questionnaire surveys.

Chapter 3 deals with service operations and the presence of the customer. This operations management perspective starts with a presentation of Richard Chase's customer‐contact model of service delivery and Christopher Lovelock's classifications of services. The rationale behind this discussion is that all services are not created equal and that they vary in terms of the customer involvement in processes. The review of Chase and Lovelock's classifications leads the authors to the discussion of the potential benefits of customer cooproduction and of the management of variability through a focus on the customer and the facility. The authors then conclude the chapter stressing the importance of linking operational procedures to service quality and profits.

Chapter 4 represents the core of the book and summarizes most of the authors' previous research on service climate from an organizational behaviour perspective. The chapter starts with an extensive discussion on the definition of the concepts of climate and climate for service, with a special focus on research and methodological issues. The second part of the chapter reviews 25 years of linkage research. Building on the results from these previous studies, the chapter ends with a discussion of their practical implications in terms of creating a service climate and of the crucial role of human resource management.

In the fifth and last chapter of the book, titled: “Where are we and where do we go from here?”, the authors tight all the chapters together restating their credo, which is: customers and service should be viewed from different fields, including marketing, operations, and human resource management/organizational behaviour. They strongly advocate for an integrated approach, which is consistent with the work of Heskett, Sasser, and Schelsinger on the service profit chain as well as the work of Christopher Lovelock. They conclude the chapter with a research agenda, organized around six questions:

1. 1.

   Are firms more effective at satisfying customers when they de‐silo?

2. 2.

   Are firms more effective when they manage the human resource management processes from a contingency perspective?

3. 3.

   How important are the personnel attributes of service employees?

4. 4.

   Should organizational behaviour/human resource management focus more on service firm profits?

5. 5.

   Is there a link between SERVQUAL dimensions and service climate dimensions?

6. 6.

   How about customer participation?

Conclusion

Service students and scholars will find the book useful because it integrates past research and current thinking on service quality and service delivery, by bringing together marketing, operations management, and organizational behaviour/human resource management literatures in a coherent and integrated framework. Written in a non‐technical language, the book is nevertheless based on solid theoretical and methodological foundations. Readers interested by the theoretical and methodological issues are directed to an extensive list of research articles. To conclude, Service Quality: Research Perspectives by Benjamin Schneider and Susan S. White is an exciting and interesting little book that should be read by any service student and scholar excited by the prospect of discovering different approaches to service quality research.