Measuring Service Quality via a Fuzzy Analytical Approach

Service quality plays an important role to pursue excellence of total quality management. Measurement of service quality requires criteria that are not only subjective but also intangible. This study proposes a Fuzzy Analytic approach for the measurement of service quality while making use of the fuzzy nature of attitude measurement and taking into consideration the dependency among several criteria. An integration of fuzzy AHP and ANP is utilized to deal with various relationships among evaluation criteria. Service quality for a Taiwanese commercial bank is measured by the proposed method. Appropriate criteria for the bank’s service quality are developed based on existing literature and interviews of the bank’s managers. Factor analysis shows that the service quality is composed by employee skills, accessibility, and tangibility. The fuzzy approach is then implemented to calculate the weights of criteria based on the relationship among them. The overall service quality can be measured by summing up the weighted score. The proposed approach is found useful to measure service quality in accordance with real world situation.