I have created suspense around SERVQUAL already a few times throughout this booklet. The suspense now comes to an end.
It seems that before the 1980s, customer satisfaction was mostly measured informally. You had staff members who asked people if there were happy. Or from time to time you had some surveys. In his article about “The rise of customer satisfaction research”, Ray Poynter express it like this: “Before the 1980s, most large brands and organizations were not customer-focused; they were product-focused and logistics-focused. The key questions they asked were: could they make the best product, and could they ship it to the right location faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than their competitors?”.
In 1988, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml, and Leonard L. Berry, a group of nerdy academics, created a tool to measure quality in a service. SERVQUAL was born. This tool is a multidimensional research instrument. Wow, that sounds serious! Basically, it is quite a long questionnaire that focuses on five dimensions:
Reliability: The ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.
Assurance: The knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence.
Tangibles: The appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication materials.
Empathy: The provision of caring; individualized attention to customer.
Responsiveness: The willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.
As I didn’t know much about SERVQUAL before I started researching the history of Service Design, I’ll let this subject use more words than it may seem to need. I’ll do this to also help myself understand the subject a bit better.
The idea behind this tool is that the quality of a service depends on the perception of the user. Ideas like phenomenology had an impact here again. SERVQUAL tries to discover how well a service meets the expectations of a customer.
According to Wikipedia’s contributors, the crazy guys behind this tool created the following formula to describe it:
SQ = P — E
SQ is service quality, P is the individual’s perceptions of a given service delivery and E is the individual’s expectations of the given service delivery.
It seems that this tool works as a questionnaire with 22 questions.
Going further
This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.