Introduction

High or superior Service quality Difficult to measure unlike goods Development of scale for measuring service quality Perceived quality: consumers judgement about an entitys excellence or superiority(Zeithmal) Mechanistic(quality)-objective aspects Humanistic(quality)-subjective response(Holbrook& Corfman)

 Garvin- five approaches to defining quality, two(manufacturing & product based)-objective quality,one (user based)-percieved quality Twelve focus group interviews current or recent users Findings customers used general criteria regardless of service type Satisfaction is related to specific transaction What feel service firm should offer(expectstions) with their perceptions of the performance of firms. Expectations are desires or wants Should offer rather than would offer.

Statistical Tools Used

1.Correlation 2.Regression 3.Hypothesis Testing 4.One way ANOVA 5.Factor Analysis

Correlation
One Variable other variable One Variable other Variable No Relationship It is not causation Coefficient of correlation(r):+1,-1,0 >0.8,<0.5 Coefficient of Determination(R2): Amount of variation in the dependent variable that is explained by the variation in the independent variable

Regression
Mathematical equation or model between dependent and independent variable. Predict or forecast Y^ = b0 + b1x

 Nonstatistical applications of hypothesis testing, the best known of which is a criminal trial. Two Hypothesis H0: The defendant is innocent H1: The defendant is guilty. Type I error occurs when we reject a true null hypothesis.(innocent person is wrongly convicted) Type II error is defined as not rejecting a false null hypothesis(guilty defendant is acquitted) significance level() P(Type II Error)=

ANOVA
Compare two or more populations Determines whether differences exist between population means. Test for significance differences among more than two sample means. Samples are drawn from populations having same mean.

Factor Analysis
simultaneous analysis of more than two variables/ attributes in a multiway classification individuals income, education, occupation and dwelling area and want to infer from these some factor (such as social class) which summarises the commonality of all the said four variables

 to group variables into factors (based on correlation between variables) and the factors so derived may be treated as new variables (often termed as latent variables) and their value derived by summing the values of the original variables which have been grouped into the factor.

Score Matrix
a1 a2 b1 b2 b3 bn

Measures (variables)
c1 c2 c3 cn k1 k2 k3 kn

Persons ( objects)

a3 an

Factor: A factor is an underlying dimension that account for several observed variables Factor-loadings: Factor-loadings are those values which explain how closely the variables are related to each one of the factors discovered. They are also known as factor-variable correlations.