Measuring Service Quality and Its Quality Function Deployment Chart: The Lexicographic Approach

Abstract

Measuring the quality of services cardinally is still a challenge for the researchers. SERVQUAL measures the quality of services ordinally amid some questionable methodological limitations such as the measuring scale of the perceived quality level and the arbitrary weighting system. The present model develops a new method to measure the quality of services (that can also be applied to measure the quality of a physical product) in an index. A mean score of relative weight has been used to measure the index of the service quality. The model has employed the Mean Score of Relative Importance to calculate the weights of different quality dimensions. However, the proposed model, like SERVQUAL, is also built on the Expectancy―Perceived Disconfirmation paradigm where the perceived differences are multiplied by their respective relative weights. This methodology is not very new. The present author measured job satisfaction with this method in 1983. Later, this model has gain popularity as the Lexicographic Method. However, the deviation between expectancy and perceived disconfirmation present in each relevant service quality dimension recognized by the consumers of the service (and not by SERVQUAL) has been assumed to be normally distributed for a 50+ sample size.