There are still firms trying to get a handle on what exactly service quality is so that they can deliver it.  I can help a bit, drawing from the wonderful research done in the 1980s by Valarie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman and Leonard L. Berry. Their conclusions appeared in the 1990 Free Press book Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations. This may seem old information to some but it’s been interesting to see how few of our customers really know this source. In that book the three authors break service quality down into five determinants, from most important to least important:

Reliability: Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately

Responsiveness: Willingness to help customer and provide prompt service

Assurance: Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence

Empathy: Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers

Tangibles: Appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication materials

This may seem like common sense, but the three authors’ conclusions are the only researched determinants of service quality we know. Almost everything else defining service quality is an educated guess.There are some interesting conclusions that can be drawn from these five determinants. The most important, I believe, is that the three most critical determinants come before empathy, on which many service people are hired.

The conclusion is that service quality, while it includes “niceness,” is in fact a detailed performance issue. If your firm is not reliable, responsive and knowledgeable, it will do it no good to focus solely on empathy. And yet much customer service training, in experience, focused on empathy and ways to use it.

To rephrase their conclusion, a firm which seeks to offer quality service most start with the actual expectations of customers and then create systems which allow the firm to provide consistent reliability, responsiveness and assurance.

In designing quality service, a firm needs to see it as a matter of cultural alignment, and not just customer service people being empathic. This is especially true of strategic accounts, where a given person at the account might phone any employee at the firm to get his questions answered. If there has not been effective training and the firm resource called is nice but knows neither the account nor the answer to questions, it sends a message that may be hard to erase in the customer's mind.