Theoretical Literature Review: The Determinants Of Service Quality

2.3 Theoretical literature review
2.3.1 The determinants of service quality
The quality of service is one of the critical success factors that influence the competitiveness of an organization. Writers for example, (Berry et al. 1985; Johnston and Lyth, 1991; Sasser et al. 1978) agree that customers’ expectations are rarely concerned with a single aspect of the service package but rather with many aspects. Parasuraman et al. (1985) provided a list of ten determinants of service quality as a result of their focus group studies with service providers and customers. This included access, communication, competence, courtesy, credibility, reliability, responsiveness, security, understanding and tangibles. In the same year Berry et al. (1985) added that although with variances in service from one service industry to the next, they believed the determinants of service quality in most (if not all) consumer service industries are included in this list.

However, Berry et al. (1985) found on one hand, a high degree of correlation between, communication, competence, courtesy, credibility and security, and, on the other, between access and understanding, thus creating the two broad dimensions of assurance and empathy, resulting into five consolidated dimensions – tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy; the basis for service quality measurement instrument, the SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al. 1988; Zeithaml et al. 1990). They reported further that, regardless of