Service quality gap in higher education: School of Postgraduate Studies (SPS) case study

Abstract

Customer satisfaction and Service quality are important concepts to academic researchers studying consumer evaluations and to practitioners as a means of creating competitive advantages and customer loyalty. The aim of this study was improving service quality gap through customer satisfaction in school of postgraduate Studies (SPS) unit in UTM. Service quality gaps are the difference between customer expectation and customer perception. Measuring gaps are the first step in enhancing customer satisfaction. School of postgraduate Studies SPS as a service provider, meets a big challenge in satisfy a large number of students as the number of students increase every year. There is a significant gap in the entire dimension in service quality model for SPS. Furthermore, SPS needs to increase customers’ satisfaction to decrease service quality gap score. The method that used for investigating service quality gap was revised SERVQUAL model. This model includes 5 dimensions, tangible, systemization, service core, social responsibility and human element. All these dimensions have some factors to measuring customer satisfaction. A sample of 120 postgraduate local and international students of UTM responded to the survey. Four research question s guide the investigation. The data collection instrument was questionnaire. The question’s of questionnaire was according to factor of revised SERVQUAL model. The result indicated that there are significant gap among dimensions of this model. Service core dimension has biggest gap among other dimensions, systemization is afterward the big gap with short difference. In general, there is low customer satisfaction among student because of gaps in service quality gap.