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Volume 5, Issue 1

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Volume 5, Issue 1

Measurement of Service Quality

Author(s)

Dr. Nitasha Sharma

Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Department of Commerce, Doaba College, Jalandhar

Abstract

Purpose: Service quality has been regarded as having the potential of not only delivering strategic benefits, but also enhancing operational efficiency and profitability of any concern. For the success and recovery of any industry, provision of high quality customer service is necessary. Therefore, an attempt in the current study has been made to develop the model in order to study the factors motivating to use offline mode of booking.

Database and Research Methodology: Primary source, i.e. Questionnaire was used to collect the data. Factor Analysis was applied to analyze the collected data.

Findings: Eight factors have been identified from the analysis, i.e. Customized Services, Empathy, Responsiveness, Reliability, Expertise, Convenient, Tangibility and Valuable Guid- ance. Further Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was applied in order to validate the model. Results revealed that all the indicators had adequate item reliability.

Limitations: Demographic variables, psycho- logical variables, etc., may influence customers’ decision making process for using offline tourism. Impact of these variables has not been examined in the current study. Further study can be conducted to check the impact of demographic and psychological variables on customer satisfaction. Moreover, same study might be designed longitudinally so as to see if tourist satisfaction with traditional service quality varies with changes in time. Such study would help the tourism companies to understand the long-held customer perceptions of traditional service quality in tourism sector.

Implications: The study is helpful for tourism service providers to understand those factors which are perceived important by tourists while they use offline mode of booking, so that they can offer them customized services. Moreover, results depict that ‘Empathy’ is an important dimension from tourists’ point of view. Thus, the study can help tourism service providers to understand this dimension in a better way to win the trust and confidence of customers. Current study will also enable the managers of travel agencies to identify their strengths and weaknesses and consequently help them in investing the available resources in the critical dimensions.

Keywords

Tourism, Service Quality, Tourists, Offline, Factor Analysis

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