Sustainable service quality of water and sewerage companies

Abstract

Although Malaysia is blessed with abundant water resources, sustainability issues on water supply and sewerage services can affect our future if they are not properly managed. Water and sewerage issues such as non revenue water (NRW), water disruption and sewage overflow have impacted the sustainability of companies' businesses and that their quality of service may be questionable. Therefore, it is crucial to identify how far a company is able to meet customer expectations as sustainable service quality (SUSSERV) by water and sewerage companies will give a positive impact on government machinery especially from the Ministry of Energy, Green Technology and Water (KeTTHA) and National Water Services Commission (SPAN). Past studies noted that previous efforts made were focusing either on water quality and water treatment or process quality based (technical issues). Thus, this research attempted to fill in the gap between service, product and process quality. The aim of this study was to measure the quality level of sustainable services for water supply and sewerage companies in Malaysia. SUSSERV model with six independent variables namely tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy with an additional dimension, sustainability, was developed by modifying the SERVQUAL instrument. This research employed a survey utilizing a quota sampling technique through 500 questionnaires of which 250 questionnaires were distributed to the customers of Syarikat Bekalan Air Selangor (SYABAS) while 250 questionnaires were distributed to Indah Water Konsortium Sdn. Bhd. (IWK) customers in the state of Selangor and Federal Territories comprising Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur. The results show that SYABAS’ perception on the service quality for all SUSSERV dimensions were much lower than IWK. It was also found that there were no significant differences between the means of perceptions with the exception of eight out of 31 variables and three out of 31 variables in the category of Services (Water and Sewerage) and in Living Status (Type of Houses) respectively. The importance-performance analysis (IPA) indicates that the Assurance and Responsiveness dimensions were at high levels but Sustainability dimension was low for both performance (perceptions) and importance (expectations). The advantage of using the IPA is to assist companies to improve their services. The IPA indicates that both SYABAS and IWK services are rated as very reliable by the customers despite the dissatisfaction of majority of the customers with the services rendered by both companies investigated in the study. The main contribution of this study is the successful utilization of a modified SERVQUAL instrument that can measure sustainable service quality. It is recommended that future research should focus on extending the use of the instrument to other states to further validate and test the instrument.