Quality Management in Service Industries

Quality management in service industries

Introduction

“Services are going to move in this decade to being the front edge of the industry.” It is a quote from IBM’s former CEO, Louis V. Gerstner. It illustrates the following changes across industry in the 21st century ( Prajogo , 2005). Services can be defined as deeds, processes and performances. It is the basis of service marketing, as well as, quality service is the core of service marketing. Currently, the services sector has been growing at a rate of 8% per annum in recent years among the world. More than half of our GDP is accounted for from the services sector .This sector dominates with the best jobs, best talent and best incomes. The imperative of service industry and management is obvious according to these data. At the meantime, the only competitive force for the enterprises no matter they are aimed at tangible products or service is the quality of service. In hence, it is necessary for merchants today to acknowledge the detailed information about the quality management in service industry. In this essay, the importance of quality service and the difficulty, faced up with in service management, compared with physical goods will be discussed.

Body

1. The definition of quality services

To begin, it is necessary to define the terms of service quality. From a manufacturing perspective, quality can be defined as zero defects, conformance with requirements, fitness for use, conformance to specifications. According to the definition of Professor Bruhn and Georigi, ‘service quality is the customer’s evaluation of a service, where they compare what their have received according to the service’s characteristics with their expectations regarding these characteristics.(Zeithaml, Bitner and Gremler,2009)’ Consumers judge the quality of services according to their perceptions of the technical outcome which service has provided, the process by which that result was delivered, and the quality of the...