Customer perceptions of service quality: A critique

Empirical research on ser vice quality and satisfaction has unearthed multi tudinous archetypes by various researchers across the world. However, all o f them have been primarily built on the SERVQUAL instrument, a 22-item scal e that measures ser vice quality. The efficacy of SERVQUAL in measuring ser vice quality has been criticized by different authors for diverse reasons, such as the operationalization of expectations, the reliability and validit y of the instrument's difference score formulation and the scale's dimensio nality across disparate industrial settings. In spite of these animadversio ns, there is a universal conformity that the 22 items are reasonably good p redictors of ser vice quality in its entirety. But a scrupulous scrutiny of the scale items connotes that the scale is not all-inclusive in the sense that it fails to address some of the critical aspects of customer perceived ser vice quality. This paper endeavours to unearth and unravel such critic al constituents of service quality which, hitherto, have been untouched in the literature, and advances a framework that could form the bedrock for a better understanding of customer perceived service quality and its determin ants.