Student expectation and perception of service quality in UTM hostel

Abstract

Customers’ satisfaction and service quality continue to attract the attention of researcher and practitioners in a wide variety of disciplines. This is not surprising, since a number of studies have shown a moderate to strong relationship between these constructs and consumer loyalty or repeat purchasing behaviour for recent works in this area. Service quality has become a predominant part for all organisation in particularly in facilities management which aims at improving customer satisfaction and customer retention. Nowadays, customers are becoming less tolerant of bad services. Since the success or failure of UTM Hostel is finally determine by customers, it is essential to examine customers’ perceptions and expectations of the quality of UTM Hostel. The aims of this study to examine the students’ perceptions and expectations towards service quality delivered by Hostel of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and to analyse the gap between perceptions and expectations using the gap analysis. The instrument used in this research is questionnaire using a modified SERVQUAL model with Likert Scale question. A total 250 number of questionnaire were sent out, only 178 respondents has returned the questionnaire. The questionnaires were distributed out to 17 student hostel in University Technology Malaysia (UTM). Frequency analysis and mean score are used to analyse the first objective while gap is used for the second objective analysis. From the analysis, although it is found that overall expectations service is considerably high and the perceptions service level towards UTM Hostel is moderate. However, the service quality delivered by UTM Hostel is below the respondents expectations due to the negative service gaps for all 24 service quality statements. In conclusion, the top management of the UTM Hostel should pay more attention and out more efforts in improving the service quality of the services provided as service quality has become more and more important.