Service Quality Deployment: Quality Service by Design

Abstract

The service-dominated and product-dominated sectors are just awakening from a service slumber to find a new generation of quality activities that call for systematic approaches to design and improvement. This paper proposes a methodological framework called Service Quality Deployment, to enable the creation of quality services by cross-functional efforts geared to incorporating the customer’s views. The approach is a synthesis of the Japanese Quality Function Deployment design system and the SERVQUAL instrument for measuring service quality. It is customer-driven in that perceived quality is directly coupled to the factors that affect the corresponding service quality attributes. The approach lends itself to the redesign of existing services for continuousimprovement in quality, and to designing-in quality in new services.