How to measure the five dimensions of service quality

Providing high-quality service to your customers is necessary in today’s competitive business landscape. Your customers will return to you over and over again if your business can do this well.

Of course, you’re always aiming to deliver excellent service. But how can you determine whether you’re living up to your customer’s standards? Since service quality is a qualitative measurement, not a quantitative one, it can be challenging to determine where you truly stand.

However, you must uncover how your customer experience (CX) measures up; otherwise, you’ll risk losing customers to your competitors. Using the five dimensions of service quality and knowing how to measure them accurately can help you find actionable ways to improve your CX and delight your customers.

Simply put, it’s how your business’s customer service measures up to your customers’ expectations.

People enter a shop or store, or make a purchase, with an expectation of service, although this varies from industry to industry and according to other factors. For example, expectations for service from a high-end furniture store differ significantly from what customers expect from shopping at a discounted outlet store.

Let’s suppose your marketing or brand positioning promises quality customer service but your business typically delivers below-par service. In that case, your customers might feel disappointed and that’s bad news for your company.

Providing a customer experience that meets or exceeds expectations increases customer loyalty and satisfaction. Service quality is essential to the overall customer experience, so knowing how to measure your service quality is vital.

Learn how to measure service performance and take the right actions to drive brand loyalty and revenue.

Measuring service quality is essential; otherwise, you won’t have a clear grasp of the service you currently provide to customers. You may assume that you know your service quality is excellent because your business is profitable. Even if you have plenty of customers, that’s not always a good indicator of service quality.

After all, you could be profitable because you currently offer the only option in your price range, geographical area or industry. But when a competitor finally comes along, if your customers find your service quality lacking, it’s likely that they will take the other option and leave your business in the lurch.

To find out how your service quality rates, you need to measure it by asking customers for their feedback and opinions. Once you know how well your service quality is living up to customer expectations, you’ll have a clearer understanding of your customers’ needs and what they value from your business. Measuring service quality will also help you find gaps or pain points that can improve your customer experience.

Additionally, measuring service quality will highlight the areas where your business is performing well so you can capitalise on those strengths in your marketing and sales. Let’s suppose your research reveals that your customers love a particular aspect of your service, such as fast shipping. In that case, you can add that into your next ad campaign to entice new customers with a service that you feel confident delivering.

Every industry has different service quality standards. After all, you don’t expect the same type of service from a high-end hotel as you do from a corner shop. Service quality varies according to brand promise: a five-star resort will have very different expectations to a budget hotel.

Despite these variations, a popular and standard way to measure service quality is SERVQUAL. Coined by Valerie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman and Leonard Berry in the book Delivering Quality Service, SERVQUAL is a widely used metric based on a set of five dimensions of service quality that customers have consistently ranked as the most important in any industry.

The five service quality dimensions are tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.

Tangibility is the appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel and communication materials.

Customers expect clean and professional facilities and shops or stores; employees who look groomed; and neat, well-written and -designed materials, such as menus, websites and signs. Attention to appearance can indicate that your company takes customer comfort seriously.

While appearance is not the most critical aspect of service, it does make a difference to how customers perceive your business, especially if your brand promises a premium or luxury experience.

Reliability is the ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.

Doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it is essential to pleasing your customers. They want to rely on your business to deliver a working product or effective service, as well as to provide help when needed, and for all of this to happen in a timely fashion.

Customers want to count on the businesses they buy from; that’s at the heart of this dimension.

Responsiveness is the willingness to help customers and provide prompt service; it lets your customers know you’re listening to them and working actively to resolve their problems.

Responding quickly to customer questions and concerns is vital, especially in today’s fast-paced world where 80% of consumers expect a response to customer service requests within one business day. Responsiveness even applies when customers are slow in responding to you. Answer swiftly to let customers know that you’re working on their request.

Assurance is employees' knowledge and ability to convey trust and confidence. Customers expect businesses to be the experts in the service they deliver. Communicating that expertise to customers helps reassure them that they can trust you, whether you accomplish this by displaying credentials and industry certifications or customer testimonials.

Assurance is significant when customers have many options but aren’t sure who to trust when purchasing. Let’s suppose you run an ecommerce store, for example. In that case, customers are bombarded day in, day out with ads from potentially untrustworthy online stores, so you need to determine how to set yourself apart and gain consumer trust.

Empathy is the caring, individualised attention that the firm provides to its customers.

Customers want to feel as if they’re more than a transaction; they want to build a relationship with your business. Even if you have the best product or services, you can still fall short of their expectations.

Showing empathy to customers means ensuring that your company showcases your care. Training employees about providing excellent and empathetic service, where smiles and engaging conversation are commonplace, can help you exceed expectations.

Learn tips that service agents can leverage to remain confident during challenging customer interactions.

The five service quality dimensions are used to measure your customers’ expectations versus how the service was actually delivered.

Measuring these dimensions regularly over time can help your business understand customer expectations, perceptions and areas for improvement, as well as track your progress in increasing your service quality.

There are many ways in which you can measure the SERVQUAL dimensions.

To improve your business’s service, you need to understand how satisfied customers are and whether their expectations are fulfilled. One of the best ways to do this is by asking customers for their feedback using service quality questionnaires.

These questionnaires are typically sent after a customer interaction, such as a shop or store visit, or an online help form submission. They aren’t intended solely for gathering data. If your customer reports a negative experience or interaction, you should follow up with them immediately to resolve it and report on the action taken.

Service quality questionnaires have several advantages. Since they’re sent immediately after an interaction, the details are still relatively fresh in the customer’s mind and, therefore, more accurate. They also offer information quickly so you can act swiftly on the most pressing issues.

In-app surveys are another effective mechanism for gathering customer feedback directly. Instead of sending a survey via email or paper, in-app surveys pop up while the customer is using your mobile app.

You can use these surveys to ask customers one or two quick questions about an in-store experience they’ve just had, or about the app itself or another aspect of your service quality.

In-app surveys offer a quick and easy way for customers to give their feedback. Since the experience doesn’t take them out of the app, they can give a quick rating. They also allow you to home in closely on the app experience itself, which can be useful if that’s one of the primary ways in which your customers interact with your business.

It’s best not to ask for long, open-ended answers via in-app surveys because typing detailed responses on a smartphone can require too much effort for respondents.

You can also check the data and information you’re collecting to better understand your service. Qualitatively analysing written and recorded customer service records, like chat transcripts and call records can yield insights about the customer experience that you may have otherwise missed.

To perform this qualitative analysis, you can go through low-rated recorded interactions to examine what went wrong and use the insights to adjust rep behaviour or resolve systemic issues.

You can also examine highly rated interactions to see what sets the best customer service agents apart from their lower-performing peers and use those insights to train reps as well.

Documentation analysis can be an effective companion to customer surveys. It allows you to determine how effective your customer service team is at providing high-quality service. And with the issues identified, you can provide further training for reps to improve future interactions or identify pain points in your system.

Customer effort score is a popular customer loyalty metric. It measures how easy it is for customers to do business with your company, whether that involves making a purchase, setting up a service or having a problem resolved.

CES is measured by asking customers to agree or disagree with the following statement: “[Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” The respondents can choose from seven answers ranging from strongly disagree (score 1) to strongly agree (score 7).

Calculate CES score by finding the average of all responses:

While ease isn’t everything, it’s undoubtedly a vital part of the customer experience. If you make it overly challenging for customers to get help with a problem or buy something, they will become frustrated. CES is a metric you can use to discover issues, develop actionable solutions and drive long-term customer loyalty.

First contact resolution happens when a customer’s issue is resolved during the first service interaction: no follow-up or back and forth is happening.

Calculate the first contact resolution ratio by dividing the number of issues resolved through a single response by the number that required more responses.

Avoiding the frustrating and time-consuming back and forth that can happen when a customer encounters an issue is very satisfying. They have their problem resolved faster and don’t need to keep re-explaining their issue.

Having a higher first contact resolution ratio indicates that your customer service team is skilled at resolving issues and using the proper channels. For example, it’s often hard to fix a problem at first contact via email, but a phone call or chat option can improve that ratio.

The surveys and methods described above focus on the outcome of the interaction: the customer’s subjective experience. But there’s also value in investigating the inputs, which are the elements that make for a quality service delivery.

These inputs are called leading metrics.

Examples of input metrics:

These are only a few examples of potential input metrics. There may be others that are more relevant to your industry or customer service model. Finding the inputs that have the most significant impact on your service quality can take some research and experimentation, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

Discover the key customer experience strategies and metrics that you can use to boost customer loyalty and reduce churn.

Input metrics can help you set targets for your service team in areas under their control. Although customer satisfaction depends on many subjective and out-of-control factors of your team and your business, focus on improving actions you can control.

Determining how effectively your business delivers high-quality customer service is challenging. But it’s possible. By focusing on the five most important dimensions of customer service, you’ll be on your way to making the most effective improvements to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Looking for the best way to send feedback surveys, analyse customer data and improve your service quality? Explore SurveyMonkey customer service solutions.