Service Quality Management in Selected Universities of Punjab: Students’ Perspective

Abstract

Globally, be it in an industry or in a higher education institution, service sector is fast emerging as a major contributor that energizes the socio-economic growth of a nation. Today, this sector employs much more people, globally, than any other sector and in many countries services are the major contributor to their economy. Unlike physical products, it is difficult to measure service quality of educational institutions, as we cannot determine the specific standards of quality measurement due to involvement of human behaviour. The student’s satisfaction is often used to assess the educational quality, where the ability to address strategic needs is of prime importance. In the presented study effort has been made to assess and evaluate the service quality management practices in Universities and the student’s perception of service quality rendered by the higher educational institutions functioning in the state of Punjab in India. The main objective of the study was to examine the differences in the student’s perception on the service quality in relation to the demographic factors, academic profiles and area of specialization and to identify the service quality predictors as per the perception of the students of the selected universities. The evaluation of service quality performance from student’s perspective is critical as they are directly involved in the process of education. They are both the consumer as well as customer and a product of the education institutions. Based upon the various test including the factor analysis carried out on the data collected from the three chosen universities of Punjab, it has been found that the main factors which affect the service quality being provided by HEI’s are Service Quality Commitment (SQM), Tangible and Facilities. It was observed that age of the students is a non-significant predictor of overall satisfaction from services provided by the university, whereas, gender was observed to be a significant predictor of overall satisfaction with services provided (p≤.05). Hence, it can be concluded from the study that the HEI’s should devise specific service policies based upon the demographic factors, academic streams and performance. It can thus be implied that HEIs need to place emphasis on all the dimensions of service quality and take into account, more importantly the gender aspect of the demographic factor while maintaining adequate standards of service. Similarly, the service to be offered to the engineering, management and science students has to be outlined differently. Also the HEIs must look into providing different services to the students with outstanding academic performance and to those who are relatively average in their studies.