Perceived service quality vs customer expectation in motorcycle shop

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an important concept to any business who wants to be competitive in market places. It is very important for companies to know how to measure this concept from the consumers’ perspective in order to better understand of needs and hence satisfy them. In Malaysia, despite the fact that the request of motorcycle is increasing, motorcyclist satisfaction is decreasing due to the reason that unfulfilled customer expectation of motorcycle services provided which resulted in customer dissatisfaction. This can be explained by the fact that the lack of customer satisfaction from motorcycle shops indicates the gap appeared between perception and customer expectation of services and product quality. This problem has been left unnoticed and even unexplored in previous research. Therefore, this study purports to adopt the service quality model for describing the gap existing between consumers’ expectations and their perceptions, and adopt the notion of SERVQUAL instrument for measuring this gap. Additionally, this study assessed the level of perceived service quality, satisfaction in motorcycle service context by using mean analysis based on a sample of 302 motorcyclist consist of students, administrative and non-administrative staff from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. By means of the SERVQUAL instrument, it is found that gap do exist between customers’ expectations and their perceptions related to motorcycle shop. The result indicates that all dimensions have deep gap and the biggest gap belongs to Tangible which indicates the lack of provision of physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of contact and the lowest gap is devoted to Reliability which shows waiting time in received services, which contributes the motorcyclist dissatisfaction. Based on the finding obtained from the survey, this study recommends to firstly increase capacity such as equipment and employee. Secondly, the implication of using IT (website and social network) would be helpful for increasing interaction with customers and also reduce the time of responses. Finally, training and education of employee is to ensure solving customers problems about the services quality and also the employee is updated to overcome the latest weaknesses discovered of services quality. This analysis of motorcycle shop can be used to evaluate them to fortify the weakness. Also motorcycle shop can find appropriate strategy in order to stay competitive.