Defining and measuring service quality in a manufacturing company

The servitization of the manufacturing industry has created a new demand for understanding service quality and how service quality can be measured. Services are different from products in many ways, not the least in the way quality is evaluated by the customers. For services it is not only what the service delivers that is important but also how it is delivered. Quality must hence be measured both as the outcome of the service and as the customers’ perception of the service process. In the 80’s researchers begun to develop different tools for measuring perceived service quality such as the survey tools SERVQUAL and SERVPERF. Together with the development of SERVQUAL researchers began to explore what quality dimensions that was relevant for services. While some argue that service quality can be expressed through a fixed set of quality dimensions most researchers agree that different quality dimensions are relevant for different types of services. In previous research on service quality only limited attention has been given to services offered by manufacturing companies in business to business (B2B) settings. Instead much focus has been directed towards health care, restaurants and other business to consumer settings. Previous research has also tried to see if the same quality dimensions are relevant for similar services by grouping them in different ways. Several researchers have classified services offered by manufacturing firms based on whether they are product related or address the customers’ processes and whether they are transaction based or relationship based. This lead to the purpose of this thesis: This study aims to identify what quality dimensions and quality measures that are relevant for services offered by a manufacturing company in a B2B setting, focusing in particular on the hardware support services. Furthermore this study aims to investigate if there are any differences in between different service classes regarding what quality dimensions and measures that are relevant. To fulfill the purpose a case study at Ericsson was performed and a literature study undertaken. Service classification, quality dimensions and quality measures was the three areas that were reviewed in the literature study. Ericsson has a wide service portfolio with different types of services which can be classified as productor process oriented and transactionor relationship based. Through interviews and secondary data analysis, quality dimensions and measures relevant for the different services was identified, and the purpose could be fulfilled. The case study identified a set of quality dimensions for the different services. Especially for maintenance services where an in depth study was done was it possible to identify a large set of dimensions influencing the customers’ quality perception. The conclusion from the case study is that different quality dimensions are relevant for different services for a manufacturing company in a B2B setting. However, both outcome measures and perception measures were found relevant for all types of services. Different quality dimensions were found for different services within the same service class which implies that it is hard to predict what dimensions that are relevant by simply classifying a service as product or process oriented and transaction based or relationship based. Except for maintenance services there was limited access to the voice of the customer why it is likely that not all relevant quality dimensions were found for all services. This made it hard to see any consistent differences between the service classes. However, reliability was found relevant for all services and there are some indications that proactivity are more relevant for relationship based services. For maintenance services, where products are used in the service delivery, product quality also becomes relevant.