Expected and Perceived Service Quality of the Tertiary Level Students of University of Worcester

Abstract

Education industry falls in the genre of service industry, because of its
characteristics. So it is important to understand how customers evaluate the
quality of education service. Customers’ satisfaction depend on service quality
and organisations’ future reputation depend on customers satisfaction, The
service providers also need to understand where the experienced service has
failed to meet the expectation of the customers, so that they can design the
service process to minimize the gap. To understand this phenomenon a case
study of University of Worcester has been presented here. As a service provider
organization, University of Worcester has to deal with students of different
countries, who have different service requirements and different reference bases
to evaluate the education service. The gap between the expected and the
perceived overall education service of University of Worcester has been
explored in this study. This gap is analyzed by taking GAP model into account,
which has been measured in the five dimensions of SERVQUAL scale. It is
found that, only in terms of ‘responsiveness’ dimension, the perceived service of
University of Worcester could not match the expectation of the students. But this
gap is very insignificant. On the other hand the perceived service is higher in
terms of all other dimensions, which are- tangible, reliability, assurance and
empathy. The only significant gaps lay in ‘Tangible’ and ‘Assurance’
dimensions. This finding may be helpful to understand what type of information
should be conveyed to what type students and how to customize the marketing
activities to the students of different countries.