Improvement on the Method of Service Quality Gap Measurement

SERVQUAL is a gap method in service quality measurement and is often recommended in classical textbooks, or cited by many literatures. But there have always been some papers persisting that SERVQUAL gap is not a good method to service quality measurement because of the problems of reliability, discriminant validity, spurious correlations, and variance restriction etc. Considering SERVQUAL is a good instrument for service quality diagnosis, and for the above issues, we attempt to improve the SERVQUAL gap method from three facets, that is, choosing operational definition of expectation; importing self-confidence to expectation in service quality measurement; and adopting the formative service quality measurement model. Finally we test the modified gap model empirically in 2006 Shenyang International Horticultural Exposition (EXPO).