Service quality of fast food chains

1

Contents Abstracts .............................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 2

Service Quality...................................................................................................................... 3

Model of Service Quality Gaps ............................................................................................. 3

Gap Model of Service Quality ............................................................................................... 4

Methodology ........................................................................................................................ 4

Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 9

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 9

Appendix 1: ServQual Survey ............................................................................................. 10

2

Service Quality of Fast Food Chains McDonalds, KFC, Subway, Dominos

Abstracts

The services are the activities are difficult to evaluate because of intangibility and

heterogeneity. But these features have not limited the scope of services which is very wide

and becoming popular in emerging economies like India, especially the services offered by

fast food industry. The growth of fast food industry in India has been manifolds. With the

changing lifestyle of young professionals and their busy schedule and ease of doing business,

the demand of chain of fast food restaurants has been on a higher side. Service firms are

realizing the significance of customer centred philosophies and service quality are turning to

quality management approaches to help managing their businesses. Thus, this paper studies

the service quality of the famous fast food chain of restaurants - McDonald’s, KFC, Subway

and Dominos. In this study, Servqual instrument has been used to identify the gaps between

the customers’ expectations and perceptions regarding various Fast Food Chains.

Keywords: Service, Quality, Gaps, SERVQUAL, Customer, Expectations, Perceptions

Introduction

Managers in the service sector are moving toward making their services more customer-centric and also focus on improving performance. With constraints of finances and resources under which service organisations operate, it becomes essentials that customer expectations are properly understood and measured and from the customers’ perspective, any gaps in service quality are identified. Which in turn helps the organisation with information which a manager uses to identify cost-effective ways of closing service quality gaps and of prioritizing which gaps to focus on – a critical decision given scarce resources.

While there have been efforts to study service quality, there has been no general agreement on the measurement of the concept. The majority of the work to date has attempted to use the SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1985; 1988) methodology in an effort to measure service quality (e.g. Brooks et al., 1999; Chaston, 1994; Edvardsson et al., 1997; Lings and Brooks, 1998; Reynoso and Moore,1995; Young and Varble, 1997; Sahney et al., 2004).

One of the aims of this report involves the use of SERVQUAL instrument in order to ascertain any actual or perceived gaps between customer expectations and perceptions of the service offered in various fast food chains. In the following, after a brief review of the service quality concept, the model of service quality gaps and the SERVQUAL methodology is demonstrated. Then, after a discussion, major conclusions are derived.

3

Service Quality

One of the method used for managing service quality is Servqual. Earlier Servqual is known as

RATER, a quality management framework. Servqual to measure quality in the service sector.

The Servqual originally consist ten elements of service quality, but later, these were collapsed

into five factors - Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and Responsiveness (RATER).

• Reliability: the ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.

• Assurance: the knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey

trust and confidence.

• Tangibles: the appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel and

communication materials.

• Empathy: the provision of caring, individualized attention to customers.

• Responsiveness: the willingness to help customers and to provide prompt service.

Different service sectors using Servqual to measure and manage service quality by analysing

questionnaire that measures both the customer expectations regarding service quality in

terms of five dimensions (RATER), and their perceptions about service they receive. When

customer’s expectations are more than their perceptions service quality is deemed to be low.

Model of Service Quality Gaps

The Servqual identified five Gaps that may cause customers to experience poor service

quality, which are shown in Figure 1. The model is an extension of Parasuraman et al. (1985).

Following are the gaps in service quality

Gap 1: Customers’ expectations versus management perceptions: as a result of the

lack of a marketing research orientation, inadequate upward communication and too

many layers of management.

Gap 2: Management perceptions versus service specifications: as a result of

inadequate commitment to service quality, a perception of unfeasibility, inadequate

task standardisation and an absence of goal setting.

Gap 3: Service specifications versus service delivery: as a result of role ambiguity and

conflict, poor employee-job fit and poor technology-job fit, inappropriate supervisory

control systems, lack of perceived control and lack of teamwork.

Gap 4: Service delivery versus external communication: as a result of inadequate

horizontal communications and propensity to over-promise.

Gap 5: The discrepancy between customer expectations and their perceptions of the

service delivered: as a result of the influences exerted from the customer side and the

shortfalls (gaps) on the part of the service provider. In this case, customer

expectations are influenced by the extent of personal needs, word of mouth

recommendation and past service experiences.

4

Gap Model of Service Quality

Methodology

The SERVQUAL instrument has been the method used to measure consumers’ perceptions of

service quality. In the SERVQUAL instrument, 22 statements (Appendix I) measure the

performance across these five dimensions, using a seven point likert scale measuring both

customer expectations and perceptions (Gabbie and O'neill, 1996). It is important to note that

without adequate information on both the quality of services expected and perceptions of

services received then feedback from customer surveys can be highly misleading from both a

policy and an operational perspective. In the following, the application of SERVQUAL

approach is more specified keeping in mind the fast food industry.

In a research conducted by us, a total of 100 questionnaires were distributed to the customers

in Kolkata and 20 useable questionnaires were returned, resulting in a 20 per cent response

rate. This survey was conducted for 4 fast food chains in Kolkata, namely McDonalds, KFC,

Subway and Dominos.

The four fast food chains were compared on the basis of 5 Servqual dimensions and their

relative GAP scores. Following are the findings:

As can be seen from the reliability chart the highest gap score is observed for KFC (-2.8733).

This is a real cause for concern for KFC. The customer feels that they cannot perform the

service dependably and accurately all the time. So this is the parameter that they must work

5

upon to bridge the gap between customer expectation and perception. All the other three

firms have almost similar scores on reliability.

According to the tangibility chart, McDonalds has the lowest gap, which indicates that the

appearance of their physical facilities appeals to customer. They also have modern equipment

and maintain proper hygiene. This helps this firm to attract larger customer base than its

competitors. KFC again has the highest gap so they need to work on it.

Responsiveness of Dominos has the lowest score (-0.6125). According to the score Dominos

is willing to help customer and to provide prompt service. Which can be observed in their

delivery mechanism, as well as customer complain handling. For example, Dominos generally

replaces quickly if there is some problem in the order, giving customer best quality response.

On the other hand, KFC is unable to provide prompt services/responses.

-0.9

2

-2.8

73

3

-0.9

59 -0

.66

D O M I N O S K F C S U B W A Y M C D O N A L D S

A V G . G A P S C O R E

RELIABILITY-0

.95

-3.1

43

75

-0.9

29

37

5

-0.6

5D O M I N O S K F C S U B W A Y M C D O N A L D S


TANGIBILITY

6

Assurance is the knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and

confidence. Subway, clearly has the minimum gap score, which can be justified as the process

of making the sub (sandwich), is right in front of the customer, as well as customised to their

choice. The employees are friendly as well as knowledgeable and also guide customers from

time to time. Also dominos, with their open kitchen concept provide the similar level of

assurance. While KFC again remains far behind.

As can be inferred from the graph, KFC and McDonalds have the highest gap score, they have

a very little contact with the customers other than for taking the orders. But in subway and

dominos the individual curiosity of the customers was met by the employees and also helps

the customers to choose from the variety of choices available.

-0.6

12

5

-2.9

02

08

-0.6

63

12

5

-1.1

25



RESPONSIVENESS

-0.6

87

5

-2.7

08

33

-0.6

68

75

-0.9

25



ASSURANCE

7

According to the avg. gap score in the graph below, the highest gap score was for the reliability

and responsiveness. This is a real cause for concern and a definite starting point for service

improvement. As can be seen from the results the customer expects more from reliability

dimension of fast food service. The relatively low importance of empathy, could be

attributable to the fact that customers are aware of the fact that it’s a quick “grab and run”

kind of a service than a fine dining. Customers allocated to Assurance the low weighting,

indicating it to be of less importance to them, yet they expect most from this service

dimension. This apparent anomaly is probably due to the fact that customers expect staff to

be knowledgeable about the service and therefore they can see no reason for this dimension

not to be achieved. It is assumed that for this reason, customers have weighted this dimension

low. Tangibility is also important to the customer, as they expect good aesthetics and

ambience.

As can be seen from the chart, the responses from questionnaire were negative, indicating a

significant short-fall in meeting customer expectation across all service areas and dimensions.

The summary score was obtained by the following formulae:

-0.5

2

-2.8

3

-0.5

39

5

-1



EMPATHY

-1.4

-1.35

-1.3

-1.25

-1.2

-1.15

reliability responsiveness Assurance Empathy tangibility

GAP SCORE AVG. ALONG THE DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS

8

𝑆𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 =∑(𝐴𝑣𝑔.𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛×𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑤𝑒𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛)

5

The weighted avg. score has been totalled to achieve the overall Servqual score. KFC needs

to work upon all the five dimensions of service quality. According to the results, Subway needs

to work upon tangibility by improving their aesthetic values to reduce the gap score. Dominos

and McDonalds has an above avg. performance, within the fast food chains.

-0.6 -0.5 -0.4 -0.3 -0.2 -0.1 0

AVERAGE (= Total / 5) WEIGHTED SERVQUAL SCORE

Dominos

KFC

Subway

McDonalds

-0.1646

-0.5876

-0.1666

-0.1587

ServQual Score

9

Discussion

The largest negative gaps, combined with assessment of where expectations are highest,

facilitates prioritization of performance improvement. Equally, if gap scores in some aspects

of service do turn out to be positive, implying expectations are actually not just being met but

exceeded, then this allows managers to review whether they may be "over-supplying" this

particular feature of the service and whether there is potential for re-deployment of

resources into features which are underperforming. It seems that in almost all the existing

resources, the SERVQUAL approach has been used only for closing Gap 5. However, its

application could also be extended to the analysis of other gaps. It is important to note that

SERVQUAL is only one of the instruments used in service quality analysis and there are

different approaches which might be stronger in closing gaps.

Service provision is complex, it is not simply a matter of meeting expressed needs, but of

finding out unexpressed needs, setting priorities, allocating resources and publicly justifying

and accounting for what has been done". Service organizations are responsible and

accountable to citizens and communities as well as to customers and service users. It is

important to note that the measurement systems themselves are often inappropriate

because the system designers do not know enough about what is to be measured. Measuring

customer perceptions of service may increase expectations and measuring too often may well

result in customers losing their motivation to answer correctly. Finally, there is no point in

measuring service quality if one is not willing to take appropriate action on the findings

Conclusion

The results of our survey shows, other than KFC, all the 3 firms have almost similar Servqual

score that is because most of the respondents were vegetarian. And in KFC the choice for

vegetarians are very low, so it is never the first choice for them.

10

Appendix 1: ServQual Survey

1. When Fast Food Restaurant Company promises to do something by a certain time, it

does so

2. When you have a problem, Fast food Restaurant Company shows a sincere interest in

solving it

3. Fast food Restaurant Company performs the service right the first time

4. Fast food Restaurant Company provides its services at the time it promises to do so

5. Fast food Restaurant Company insists on error-free records

6. Fast food Restaurant Company keeps customers informed about when services will be

performed

7. Employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company gives your prompt service

8. Employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company are always willing to help you

9. Employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company are never too busy to respond to your

request

10. The behaviour of employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company instils confidence in you

11. You feel safe in your transactions with Fast Food Restaurant Company

12. Employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company are consistently courteous with you

13. Employees in Fast Food Restaurant Company have the knowledge to answer your

questions

14. Fast food Restaurant Company gives you individual attention

15. Fast food Restaurant Company has employees who gives your personal attention

16. Fast food Restaurant Company has your best interest at heart

17. Employees of Fast Food Restaurant Company understand your specific needs

18. Fast food Restaurant Company has operating hours that are convenient to all its

customers

19. Fast food Restaurant Company has modern looking equipment

20. Fast food Restaurant Company's physical facilities are visually appealing

21. Fast food Restaurant Company's employees appear neat

22. Materials associated with the service (such as pamphlets or statements) are visually

appealing at Fast Food Restaurant Company

Service quality of fast food chains

Services

Transcript of Service quality of fast food chains