IMPLEMENTING SERVICE QUALITY IN SHOPPING CENTRES

Abstract

Today service quality has become more or less of a shopping centre mandate. Shopping centers need to improve service quality or run the risk of being driven out of business. The growth of service quality focus is regarded as having significant implications for most shopping centres. The theoretical framework, SERVQUAL is a concise multi-item scale with good reliability and validity that shopping centres can use to better understand the service expectation and perception of their customers. It provides the basic skeleton through its expectation and perception format encompassing statements for each of the 5 service quality dimensions namely, tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. These dimensions of service quality effectively become a measure of retailing performance, as perceived by both local and foreign shoppers. The findings from the research show that service quality level of shopping centres in Singapore do not meet up with the expectations of shoppers. The results from both the CBD and regional surveys are negative, indicating that Gap 5 exist in these two categories of shopping centres. With the SERVQUAL instrument, the seriousness of the gaps in each of the five dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy) of the SERVQUAL Model can be determined.