Authors : Tan Owee Kowang, Oh Jia De and Choi Sang Long
Abstract: Home delivery service has increasingly viewed as one of the important supply chain components within food and beverage industry. Hence, this study aims to establish a practical guideline on the development of service quality specification for new home delivery service or HDS. In conjunction with this, the study develops a home delivery service quality conceptual framework that outlines 5 important stages on the development of service quality specification for a new HDS. Firstly, the framework adapts SERVQUAL dimensions model and align the dimensions with HDS setting with the ultimate aim to form a set of service quality dimensions for the new HDS or namely HDS dimensions. At the second stage, the HDS dimensions are subsequently transformed into a questionnaire to assess the customers’ expectation level on each of the HDS dimension prior to the commencement of HDS. The assessment result of customer expectation is next used in the third stage as the main input to outline the preliminary set of HDS service quality specification. Subsequently, at post implementation stage of HDS or stage four, the service quality conceptual framework suggests an assessment of perceived customer satisfaction level based on the same set of HDS dimensions used in stage 2. At the final stage, comparison of customer expectation level and customer satisfaction level on each HDS dimension is made with the objective to identify HDS service quality improvement opportunities. The HDS service quality conceptual framework proposed in this study carries a value for further validation. Hence, the continuation for this paper is to validate the framework via field work.
Tan Owee Kowang, Oh Jia De and Choi Sang Long, 2016. The Development of Service Quality Specification for Home Delivery Service. International Business Management, 10: 3655-3661.