The importance of service and service quality has been growing in the world economy since the late 1970s. Establishing new levels of sophistication and rigor, as well as a broad set of approaches, Service Quality presents the latest research and theory in customer satisfaction and services marketing.

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This extensively revised and updated edition explores even further the ways technology influences both the experiences of library customers and the ways libraries themselves can assess those experiences.

Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customer's need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery. For example, Florida Power & Light has developed a sophisticated, computer-based lightening tracking system to anticipate where weather-related service interruptions might occur and strategically position crews at these locations to quicken recovery response time. Offering a service that customers expect to be available at all times and that they will miss only when the lights go out, FPL focuses its energies on matching customer perceptions with potential need. Deluxe Corporation, America's highly successful check printer, regularly exceeds its customers' expectations by shipping nearly 95% of all orders by the day after the orders were received. Deluxe even put U.S. Postal Service stations inside its plants to speed up delivery time. Customer expectations change over time. To anticipate these changes, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company regularly monitors the expectations and perceptions of their customers, using focus group interviews and the authors' 22-item generic SERVQUAL questionnaire, which is customized by adding questions covering specific aspects of service they wish to track. The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service -- reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles -- goes right to the heart of the tendency to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceived quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.

Service quality is at the forefront of how the leisure, events, tourism and sport (LETS) sectors operate. An important consideration for any business, and therefore any student of the subject, this new edition of a successful textbook addresses the key points and principles of managing service quality across the industry sector. Considering the underpinning theory of service quality, this book informs the reader of the practical application of service quality management tools and techniques in an industry with distinctive features and challenges. An invaluable read for students within the LETS sectors, it also provides a useful refresher for practitioners working in the industry.

Good customers expect excellent service. Increasingly, library customers are looking to online services instead of to the library for information. For every library that wants to win satisfied customers and bring those that have strayed back into the library, here are proven tools to assess needs and improve service.

Providing clear guidance for anyone servicing internal or external customers, this book offers a framework for analyzing and managing quality using a comprehensive closed-loop approach. This book cuts through the complexities of the mantra ‘better, cheaper, faster’ (BCF) and offers procedures for the evaluation of customer needs, the determination of performance metrics, and the design of effective customer satisfaction surveys. It details basic statistical techniques and packages the framework, procedures, and methods into a management construct that includes external quality certification systems and internal performance management systems. Importantly, the book also describes how these systems can be implemented in a virtual workplace. This quality management book will be essential to service-oriented firms (financial, government, healthcare, hospitality, etc.), as well as any firm with internal customer service processes such as human resource management, purchasing, and accounting. Professionals at all levels, corporate trainers, and students will welcome this book’s common set of principles and tools, accompanied by many case studies that illustrate how they are applied in various environments.