SERVQUAL

The SERVQUAL questionnaire was first published in 1985 by a team of academic researchers in the United States, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry, to measure quality in the service sector.

In spite of the long-standing interest in SERVQUAL and its myriad of context-specific applications, it has attracted some criticism from researchers.

The SERVQUAL instrument was developed as part of a broader conceptualization of how customers understand service quality.

[11] Among students of marketing, the mnemonic RATER, an acronym formed from the first letter of each of the five dimensions, is often used as an aid to recall.

When customer expectations are greater than their perceptions of received delivery, service quality is deemed low.

[14] The model's developers began with an exhaustive literature search in order to identify items that were believed to impact on perceived service quality.

By the early 1990s, the authors had refined the model to five factors which in testing, appear to be relatively stable and robust.

These are the five dimensions of service quality that form the basis of the individual items in the SERVQUAL research instrument (questionnaire).

The acronym RATER, is often used to help students of marketing remember the five dimensions of quality explicitly mentioned in the research instrument.

Although the SERVQUAL instrument has been widely applied in a variety of industry and cross-cultural contexts, there are many criticisms of the approach.

Francis Buttle published one of the most comprehensive criticisms of the model of service quality and the associated SERVQUAL instrument in 1996 in which both operational and theoretical concerns were identified.