Measuring Service Quality in the Car Service Industry: Building and Testing an Instrument

Abstract

Service quality is becoming an important issue for Dutch car service firms. In order to measure the service quality delivered develops an instrument based on the quality dimensions and the SERVQUAL questionnaire developed by Berry, Parasuraman and Zeithaml. Describes the building and testing of the instrument. The outcome of the research is that the instrument is easily applicable for Dutch garage firms. However, in contrast with the five SERVQUAL dimensions, the customers in the Dutch car service firms only distinguish three dimensions to judge the delivered quality, one of which appears to be totally specific to this sample. The three dimensions found in the research in car service firms are: customer kindness, tangibles, and faith. Only customer kindness contributes directly to the measured service quality.