Service quality and customer's satisfaction in academic libraries Essay

Service quality and customer's satisfaction in academic libraries - Essay Example A real library contains these along with various instructional and access tools and a high quality customer service. In a library, the fundamental goal of a librarian is to make sure that the service provided is consistent with the mission of the institution of which library forms a part. Service quality of academic libraries: Past and present: Service quality of an academic library is a measure of the customer satisfaction and the extent to which customers feel that their expectations have meet met by the service given. Calculation and management of the customer satisfaction has remained a usual practice in for-profit sector for long. The assessment of service quality in the present age finds its roots in the same old trend of measurement of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has frequently undergone many changes in the last four decades as a concept. According to Crosby (1993), the contemporary concept of service quality is significantly influenced by all the approaches m ade to it in that past that include the 1960s’ corporate image studies and the 1980s’ total quality approach adopted by many economies in the West. The corporate image studies formed the very initial stage of calculation of customer satisfaction that emerged in the 1960s. The image surveys included questions about customer satisfaction and customers’ views about the quality of service given. These questions investigated the progressiveness and the company’s level of engagement with the community. In the later half of the 1960s, the commencement of studies about the product quality emerged as the second stage of customer satisfaction measurement. A satisfaction index resulted from the adequacy-importance model which served as the cardinal means of measurement of the customer satisfaction, and played an important role in defining the attitudes of the customers. A revolution in the customer satisfaction measurement occurred in the 1980s when the American aut omobile business increased manifolds in competition and many syndicated studies were made. The measurement of customer satisfaction in the contemporary age is quite similar to the trend introduced in the 1980s. The businesses turned to customer satisfaction as a measurement of their quality of service rather and the process of assessment became more intangible. The Gaps Model of Service Quality: Parasuraman, Berry and Zeithaml (1985) formed a research group to measure the customer satisfaction using the Gaps Model of Service Quality. The Gaps Model made a totally new approach to the measurement of customer satisfaction by determining the gaps between the expectations of customers and their views regarding the quality of service. In this model, customers establish their expectations, as well as the lowest quality of service that would be acceptable to them. Then once the service has been delivered, the customer explains how he thinks about the quality of service he/she was delivered. The equation, thus, goes as follows: Perceived service quality – expected service quality = gap in service quality. According to Hernon and Nitecki (2001), there are four basic perspectives that define the quality of service namely, excellence, value, compliance with specifications, and achievement of expectations. It is the fourth perspective