SERVQUAL Method

To exceed the expectations of customers, whose primary concern is to yield the highest value related to their business goals, a port must meet all customer goals and address concerns not only in port business but also in other service sectors. One means is through improving the flow of right materials and information and reducing waste and cycle time.

A port, like any other business, needs to evaluate how much business is being generated, the quality and delivery of services, and customer satisfaction, including customer feedback.

A port or terminal is just as much a business as any factory, supermarket, bank or professional service provider. And just like any other business, it needs to know how much business it is doing, how well it is carrying it out, and what its customers think of it. In other words, it must measure its performance. It has been well said that measurement of performance is the first step towards successful management of any business venture — without performance measures and data, managers are navigating blindly, and cannot know where their business is or where it is going.

Finally, as well as using performance measures to indicate how much work, how efficiently and how intensively the organization performs, it is essential to measure the quality of service provided to its customers. So the fourth category of performance measures is service measures. They are really ways of finding out how the customer views the organization’s performance. A variety of service measures can be used by the terminal to discover how satisfied its customers (ship operators, shippers and receivers of cargo, and transport operators) are with the service provided, and what quality of service is being offered to them.

The terminal may be the only container terminal in the area, and its management might feel that it has a captive customer base, but it must always remember that ship operators can still decide not to call if they feel they might receive better service elsewhere.

Shippers and importers will then have to find some other means of transporting their goods — almost certainly at higher cost. So, as to other businesses, service measures are extremely important to ports. This customer satisfaction level has become a challenge to port activities since resources are limited within the port premises. Further, poor cargo handling processes result in bottlenecks at the end of the cargo chain, and directly affect the logistics performance of the port.

These challenges negatively affect the quality of the service offered to all stakeholders of the Port of Umm Qasr who are involved in activities within the Port premises. Therefore, port customer perceptions/views were taken into consideration in evaluating the service quality of the cargo handling process, environmental responsibility and energy management at the port of Umm Qasr.

2.4.2. SERVQUAL Instrument

According to Asubonteng et al., (1996), as a result of strong competition and the aggression of environmental factors, service quality has become a fundamental marketing strategy for service providing organizations. This shows how significant improving the quality of service is to organizations for their continuation and development since it could assist them in confronting the difficulties they face in competitive markets. This suggests that service providing companies are compelled to deliver excellent quality services to their clients to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. There is, however, a requirement for these companies to realize what service quality is for the purpose of attaining their objectives.

In service providing literature, Eshghi et al., (2008) identify service quality in general as the overall evaluation of a service by the organization’s customers. Asubonteng et al., (1996) define service quality as the satisfactory level to which a service satisfies customer’s expectations. Parasuraman et al., (1985) define service quality as “the discrepancy between consumers’ perceptions of services offered by a particular firm and their expectations about firms offering such services”. The customers will consider the

quality of service low when perceived service is below expectation and satisfactory if perceived as meeting or exceeding their expectation.

SERVQUAL is a method that has been used to measure the quality of services since the 1980’s. Parasuraman et al. (1985, 1988, and 1991) developed the SERVQUAL model, containing five quality dimensions and 22 quality elements, which has subsequently been tested and accepted in many service industries. Essentially, SERVQUAL is used to measure the difference between a customer’s perception and expectations about the services they experience. Therefore, the gap between perception and expectation is used to analyze the customer satisfaction level across certain quality elements or quality dimensions.

Despite the applications of the SERVQUAL model, various scholars have criticized it.

Cronin and Taylor (1992) proposed a model called SERVPERF, which has eliminated the expectation component that exists in the SERVQUAL model. Carman (1990) stated that SERVQUAL has a lack of dimension stability as it is limited to the few industries identified by Parasuraman et al (1985, 1988). Meanwhile Ugboma et al (2004) found that all SERVQUAL dimensions were valid. Most recent studies highlight that SERVQUAL is not a universal tool to measure service quality in certain contexts, as an example in B2B services (Benazić and Došen 2012), banking (Guo, Duff and Hair 2008), and supply chains (Seth, Deshmukh and Vrat 2006). Meanwhile, various authors found that SERVQUAL dimensions are either too numerous or too few for specific contexts.

2.4.3. Service quality in Maritime transport

Competition in the transport sector has been increasing over the past few decades due to organizations attempting to improve the quality of services to achieve competitive advantage in the industry (Cotham et al. 1969). As Thai (2008) suggests, the quality of service delivery is strategically important to any kind of organization in order to survive in the industry. He adds that there is no universally accepted method or measure for quantifying the service quality experienced by customers, as the quality is highly dependent on the perceptions of the customers.

Table 1 summarizes studies carried out in the context of maritime-related service quality in chronological order to indicate the evolution of service quality thinking and models.

The table also indicates the number of dimensions used and the variety of quality dimensions used in those studies. Different studies have adopted different quality dimensions that have been introduced by different scholars who have tried to devise universal quality dimensions for the maritime sector. Table 1 illustrates the inconsistency in the use of quality dimensions in different studies as the SERVQUAL quality dimensions have failed to be represented in the maritime service quality context.

Table 1: Summary of literature in maritime sector

2.5. Data Collection and Gap Analysis