Monitoring Service Quality

While the concept of service quality is difficult to define in service organizations, the fact is that both consumers and service providers evaluate service quality on a daily basis. A conceptual framework is presented that will help service providers understand, monitor, and improve the level of service quality they provide to the consumer. The service quality monitoring system depicts gaps in the service delivery process, consisting of: 1. the service quality gap, 2. the expectations gap, 3. the service delivery gap, and 4. the perceptions gap. The present application of the service quality monitoring system focuses on the provision of health care services in a midsized hospital in the southern US. To assess the 4 gaps conceptualized in the model, unweighted scores are summed for patients' expectations, patients' perceptions, employees' expectations, and employees' perceptions. The results indicate that both patients and hospital employees have similar expectations about the level of service that should be made available.