The V-Model of Service Quality

An Exploration of African Customer Service Delivery Metrics

Grafton Whyte

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787696051
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

Grafton Whyte introduces and explores a new academic theory for customer service delivery for Africa, aimed at addressing issues of poor customer service and poor service delivery. The V-Model of Service Quality (VMSQ) offers a powerful tool for measuring service quality, augmented by a service exchange model to provide a general framework for services, describe core components and provide contexts within which the VMSQ can operate. The VMSQ provides an indication of where problems may lie in a service operation, and an additional African Management Matrix identifies some of the historical and contextual barriers that need to be overcome by African managers to achieve effective customer service delivery. This book grounds the theoretical interventions in data drawn from case studies in the Sub-Saharan African context to make the models applicable to both researchers and working managers. It looks at the complex question of customer service delivery in Africa, and embraces both concepts of customer service and service delivery.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1. THE PROBLEM OF CUSTOMER SERVICE DELIVERY (CSD) IN AFRICA

‘African solutions to African problems’ is a maxim popularised by Thabo Mbeki, the second President of the democratic Republic of South Africa. Africa in general is suffering from a crisis in the delivery of basic services such as housing, healthcare, education and essential utilities. The causes of this lack of delivery are many and complex, but significant areas impacting on this problem are poor perceptions and understanding of service.

African businesses, both large and small, are often adversely affected by a lack of customer service. While politeness, respect and hospitality to strangers are a cornerstone of most African cultures, the concept of organised customer service as a competitive advantage is poorly developed across the continent.

Not least because, while in the ‘West’ customer service is equated with speed and efficiency from the paradigm that ‘time is money’, time in many African contexts is still a much more fluid and relative concept. However, this is changing rapidly as business communities are increasingly embedded in the global village and catering for a growing middle class of professionals that demand punctuality and accountability. Progressive businesses in developed economies establish long-term relationships with their customers, embracing concepts such as customer retention, customer satisfaction and customer experience. They seek not only to maximise repeat business from their customers but also to turn them into advocates for the products and services on offer.

In many Africa countries by contrast, the relationship with the customer is mainly transactional, and in many cases almost adversarial, so that customers are treated with suspicion and as objects of exploitation. Many service providers see their role as ‘doing the customer a favour’, by granting them access to products and services as a privilege, especially where a near-monopoly exists. A transition is needed, to a context where customers are valued and suppliers seek to establish and preserve long-term relationships with them. Also, because in Africa ‘service’ is often mistaken for ‘servitude’, a concept that understandably does not sit well in our post-colonial experience.

Poor service delivery would be bad enough if it just concerned service in supermarkets, banks or taxis, but poor customer service is also pervasive in public sector entities dealing with basic services to the poor such as housing, water, education and health. If these good outcomes are to be achieved, and if the changes are to be visible, then there needs to be a careful discussion about how to measure change in customer service.

Research into customer service delivery (CSD) by the author over the past three years has unravelled the failures in service delivery that is customer focused, thus addressing the twin evils of Africa; time and efficiency.

Generally, CSD is an undervalued concept in Africa yet it could become the catalyst for many changes:

• Social change – excellent customer service is at the heart of successful basic service delivery, for example, the provision of healthcare, water and housing to the poorest sections of society.
• Competitive advantage – enlightened companies (and countries) will begin to differentiate themselves based on CSD and thereby raise the standard across the board.
• Employment creation – every country that has seriously adopted customer service has created an industry and employment, for example, customer service managers, customer service departments with call centre agents and qualified customer service experts.
• International competitiveness – with a focus on excellent CSD, African countries could become destinations of choice for global companies looking to service African markets rather than do so remotely.
• Research and innovation – Africa cannot simply adopt solutions from the rest of the world; excellent CSD in Africa will have its own unique hue and flavour.

The customer service gap is exacerbated by the lack of research in CSD in Africa. Without research benchmarks, the stage cannot be set for monitoring and improvement of service standards. This realisation led in 2014 to the birth of Customer Service Management Africa (CSMA), the brainchild of the author and a team of researchers in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Together with commercial partners, the author organised the first two Pan-African academic conference on Customer Service Management (CSM), with the aim of establishing an African research centre of excellence in Customer Service Delivery Management. Both academic conferences brought international experts in CSD to Windhoek, Namibia, to share cutting-edge research being conducted in CSM worldwide. The collection of papers submitted and presented at both conferences drew heavily on case studies from a range of African countries.

Academically, this initiative pioneered ground-breaking research into service quality, of which the V-model of service quality (VMSQ) is the result. Accepted for publication in the European Journal of Marketing, the VMSQ is an alternative service quality model to the internationally recognised and North American model, SERVQUAL.

This book is therefore a how-to guide on using the VMSQ in business, government and research.

1.2. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This book discusses three ideas: The The V Model of Service Quality (VMSQ), the Service Exchange Model (SEM) and the African Management Matrix (AMM). VMSQ is by far the most important idea and the main reason for the book. VMSQ is dealt with in detail in Chapters 2 through to 7. Starting with an overview of the VMSQ in Chapter 2 and a discussion of how to identify the attributes that feed into the VMSQ in Chapter 3. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 deal with the data collection, analysis and reporting from the VMSQ, respectively. Chapter 7 presents two case studies describing how the VMSQ has been used to measure CSD performance and diagnose issues.

The VMSQ is a tool for measuring service quality, but says nothing about how that service should look, neither the boundaries nor structure of service. The service exchange model (SEM) is a general framework for service describing its core components and provides a context within which the VMSQ operates. We also argue that applying the VMSQ does not lead to automatic solutions; in its diagnostic capacity the VMSQ provides indications where problems may lie in a service operation, but it will take intelligent management intervention to correct these problems. The African Management Matrix (AMM) identifies some of the historical and contextual barriers that need to be overcome if African managers are to achieve effective CSD. Both the SEM and AMM ideas are discussed in Chapter 8. Indeed, some readers my want to read that chapter first to get a sense of how the VMSQ will make a difference to service organisations.

Chapter 9 provides a road map for the busy manager who wants to know the practicalities of implementing the VMSQ and is the form of questions and answers. Figure 1, provides a diagrammatic overview of the book.

 

Figure 1. Overview of the Book.

CHAPTER 2

OVERVIEW OF THE VMSQ

The VMSQ as suggested earlier is a method for measuring service quality and diagnosing customer service delivery problems in a service operation.

2.1. THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

It has long been recognised by all types of businesses from those in the extractive industries, such as mining, to the corner barbershop, that attention to customer service is essential for the profitability and long-term sustainability of a business. Despite the hundreds of self-help books, training courses and consultancy companies, many if not most business owners have only a scant clue how to measure or even manage customer service. If this is true of owners in general, it is most true of owners and staff working in businesses in Africa. There are, however, a few exceptions like the hospitality industry in Kenya or Ethiopia Airlines. There is, therefore, a desperate need for a methodology for measuring and managing customer service designed specifically for the African continent.

2.2. AN ACADEMIC RESPONSE

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a strong and continuous research interest in defining and measuring service quality. Most of the output has been dominated by the work of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) and their theory, SERVQUAL. This theory is based on the idea that service quality is essentially a comparison between customers’ expectations and perceptions of a service.

As noted, in their seminal work, Parasuraman et al. (1985) argued that the underlying assumption of the service quality model is the simple formulaic relationship between three variables:

This relationship gave rise to the ‘Gap Model’ where: SQ = Gap 5, and G5 is the sum of Gaps 1 through 4.

According to Ladhari (2009):

• Gap 1 represents the difference between customer expectations and management perceptions of customer expectations.
• Gap 2 is the difference between management perceptions of consumer expectations and the translation of these perceptions into service-quality specifications.
• Gap 3 is the difference between the service actually delivered by frontline service personnel on a day-to-day basis and the specifications set by management.
• Gap 4 represents the difference between service delivery and what is promised in external communications to consumers
• Gap 5 is the difference between customer expectations and perceptions (that is, perceived service quality).

A conservative search revealed more than 300 research articles featuring application or adaptation of the SERVQUAL model, and other lesser-known attempts at measuring service quality, including works on specific sectors such as leisure, tourism and hospitality (Augustyn & Seakhoa-King, 2004); higher education (Abdullah, 2006); internal IT services (Carr, 2007); social enterprises (Al-allak & Ali Bekhet, 2011); IT research into technology adoption and continuance; and functional affordance (Tate & Evermann, 2010). Many of these studies indicate modifications of the SERVQUAL model.

Although many examples are based in a single sector, or segment of a country or an industry, the question arises as to what will work in a situation where service recipients divide into different groups with quite different needs and expectations, leading to a complex portfolio of services, relating in a complex way to the many groups? For example, modern supermarkets are increasingly aware of the competitive pressure presented by online shopping portals. Younger customers often already know about the technical aspects of the product or service before entering the shop, so managers have to be thinking about providing an interesting experience for the shopper if they want to secure their custom.

2.3. NEED FOR A NEW MODEL

These concerns, taken with the wider evidence that is found in the literature, hint strongly at the need to understand service quality at three different levels:

(1) First, to recognise the variety of circumstances that might have to be dealt with, even with just a single service. Customer expectations of a service vary significantly and are influenced by a wide range of factors such as timing, needs and cultural precepts. For example, in many African countries, service spans from eliminating the bucket toilet system to providing luxury rooms in 5-star hotels, thereby creating a huge variety of service circumstances often by similarly trained personnel.

(2) Second, to recognise the inherent complexity in the attributes of service quality, the dependencies and relationships between the attributes of service quality are such that they cannot necessarily be reduced to a single set of attributes, as many researchers attempt to do – there will be patterns of service quality that display different combinations of attributes, measured at different levels. In a survey of over 300 service quality articles published in the last 10 years, almost 100 different attributes have been postulated by researchers, all of which have a degree of validity depending on the assumptions of the study. The point is perceptual attributes are complex and difficult to be precise about and is influenced by the background and context of the individual. The bucket toilet system could be perceived as demeaning, inhumane and unhygienic in one context but by the same person in a conflict war-torn environment as humane, hygienic and liberating.

(3) Third, to take a careful approach to service quality measurement, making the best use of available information technologies and information management techniques. It is possible that search for the minimum number of common attributes which describes most, if not all, service quality instances could also have been driven by the lack of information technologies able to deal with large numbers of attributes and data sets. Parasuraman et al. (1985) reduced their original 10 service attributes to 5; this move made SERVQUAL easy to administer manually and may have set a trend towards reductionism in service quality measurement in the research community, and may also have caused a lack of precision in measurement practice.

2.4. THE VMSQ IS AN ATTEMPT TO ADDRESS THESE CONCERNS

VMSQ has been developed to separate and deal with the three levels of concern: the variety of circumstances, the relationships between attributes and the base service data that is collected. It shows how the treatmen...