Service Quality Case

Service quality becomes very important in now days and the studies on services quality had discovered that service quality is must for success and survival in today competitive environment (Ghobadadian, Speller and Jones 1994).

Services are not things, but service is a process and the process is the product. We say "airline" when we mean "air transportation". We say "movie" when we mean "entertainment services", we say "hotel" when we mean "lodging rental". The use of nouns obscures the fundamental nature of service. Which are processes not objects. (McLuhan 1964)

Society usually think that Service is something that is done for us or to us like we go to hospital for medical treatment, go to spa for relaxing, or go to workshop for car repairing. Services are more than that, if services are no different from good for example, then everything we know about goods and quality should apply, but services are different beginning with "what the service product is" and "what service delivery is such as food and cloth" (Benjamin Schneider and Susan S.white 2004).

In quality got three type of approach to define the quality, the first is philosophical approach second is technical approach and the third is user based approach (Kasper et al., 1999; Oliver, 1997), Philosophical approach define that quality is same with excellence, under this approach people know quality when they see it, but they cannot define quality further. In Technical approach defining that quality is often measured objectively and readily measurable, it is very well suit to measuring quality of standardized product that are mass product. The third approach is to define quality is the user-based (customer), that mean the quality of a product is determined by it user.

The user based view (customer perspective) of quality has been appealing in trying to define quality in services. Both user based view of quality and service quality connected each other because of the nature of service delivery itself. First the increase of intangibility of service delivery mean that people or customer cannot touch services but only can feel, remember in their minds. This measuring the quality of services delivery as perception of the user is particular need for assessing the quality of services (Benjamin Schneider and Susan S.White 2004). The user based view has there for become the main approach to assessing quality in the services literature.

In hotel industry service quality is must and with the high service quality the hotel industry can improve their market share and profitability (OH and Parks 1997). However service quality level of existing services must be measured on customer perspective and expectation by reliable and valid measurement tool.

Several studies have been conducted in an effort to clarify customer expectation and