A Project Report onAn Assessment of Service Quality of Bimtech Library

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF

THE COURSE

"RESEARCH METHODOLOGY"OF PGDM

SUBMITTED TO:

PROF.Tuhin Chattopadhyay

SUBMITTED BY:

Aditi Agrawal (08)

Amit Rathi (12)

Arjun Singh Bisht (31)

Arun Dahiya (33)

Dibyanshu Pandey (48)

Divya Pathak (51)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to our project guide,

Prof. Tuhin Chattopadhyay. We were privileged to experience a sustained, enthusiastic and

involved interest from his side. This fuelled our enthusiasm even further and encouraged us

to boldly step into what was a totally dark and unexplored expanse before us. I would also

like to thank my seniors who were ready with a positive comment all the time, whether it was

an off-hand comment to encourage us or a constructive piece of criticism and a special thank

to all those who took out time to fill our survey sheet without which our project would have

been a failure. Last but not the least, I would like to thank to Professor A.K.Dey our subject

teacher and the institute, in general, for extending a helping hand at every juncture of need.

GROUP – I (Sec – A)

Aditi Agrawal (08)

Amit Rathi (12)

Arjun Singh Bisht (31)

Arun Dahiya (33)

Dibyanshu Pandey (48)

Divya Pathak (51)

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

o Research Problemo Research Objectiveo Scope and limitationso Research designo Sample design

LITERATURE REVIEW

o Service Qualityo History of SERVQUALo SERVQUAL in library settingo Concept of service quality on library assessment

Factor Analysis

CONCLUSIONS

RECOMMENDATIONS

APPENDIXo Questionnaire 1o Questionnaire 2

REFERENCES

RESEARCH INTRODUCTION

Research ProblemThe problem of this study is to assess the quality of BIMTECH library system by investigating the 3 levels of service quality from the user prospective ( desired expectations and actual service perceptions). The result gained can identify what are user desired expectations and whether those expectations have been met or not.

Research ObjectiveThe purpose of the study is as follows:

1) To assess the overall service quality of BIMTECH library system from the user prospective.

2) To identify the dimensions that determines the customer evaluation of service quality in BIMTECH library system

3) To investigate which are the essential attributes that library administration should allocate the resource for good service quality.

4) To identify the problems user had encountered when involved in library service

Scope and Limitations: This study is conducted to assess the library service quality for the purpose to help the library staff in understanding institutional and user differences and similarities. The data collected should not be seen as value judgments or as indicators or defining “good” or “bad” service.

Research DesignThe project will start with an exploratory study by asking different students what they consider as important for library services. By interviewing few people exploratory study will yield some factors (27 - 25). Questions will be framed on a likert scale on each of these 27-25 factors. With the factor analysis number of factors will be reduced .Data collection will be done on each of these factors on the expected and actual level and  t-test will be applied to find the difference and to come up with conclusion and recommendations.

Sampling Design

Target Population: BIMTECH Students

Sample Size: 162

Sampling Strategy: Stratified Sampling

Sampling technique

We will be using sampling technique called stratified sampling. Stratification is the grouping members of the population into relatively homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should be mutually exclusive: every element in the population must be assigned to one stratum. The strata should be collectively exhaustive: no population element can be excluded .Then random or systematic sampling is applied within each stratum. This often improves the representativeness of the sample by reducing sampling error. It can produce weighted mean that has less variability than the arithmetic mean of a simple random sample of the population.

Collection Instrument

Data Compilation

Collection DesignDe

Data Collection Operations

Missing Data Avoidance

Literature Review

As the service sector of the global economy grows, the study of services and innovation are becoming increasingly important. Service products distributed regionally, nationally, and globally have become larger portions of company revenue streams; knowledge-intensive business services aimed at enhancing performance require reliable methods of measurement, assessment, and improvement (Spohrer & Maglio, 2008). As a result, accurate and reliable instruments that assess service quality are of great interest to companies whose revenues come from service delivery. Perhaps the most popular and widely used service quality instrument is SERVQUAL.

Service Quality

In 1988 Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry developed a generic instrument called SERVQUAL to measure service quality based on input from focus groups. Although SERVQUAL was developed within the marketing sector, it also is used in a variety of organizational settings, including Landrum, Prybutok, Zhang, & Peak 19 libraries and

information centers (Kettinger & Lee, 1994; Nitecki, 1996). Since 1988 Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry have made numerous changes to SERVQUAL, some in response to problems identified by other researchers. For instance, in 1994 they reported on three different SERVQUAL formats; they recommended that researchers use a format that separated customer expectation scores into tolerance zones.Researchers have continued to use SERVQUAL instruments. In 1997, Van Dyke, Kappelman, and Prybutok employed SERVQUAL in an IS context, while in 2002 Banwet and Datta measured IT service quality in a library service, as did Landrum and Prybutok in 2004. Still, some researchers question the appropriateness of using SERVQUAL in an IS or IT context; others disagree about whether the service quality should be the difference between expected and perceived service. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) stated that since service quality depends on the relationship of customer expectations with customer perceptions, it is appropriate to calculate service quality by subtracting expected from perceived service. One then achieves an overall measure of service quality by averaging the scores of all items (Brown, Churchill, & Peter, 1992).However, this procedure gives also rise to two issues: the first is disagreement over what really is being measured in SERVQUAL with expectations and the second is the problematic nature of the resulting difference scores.These two issues are resolved if one follows Cronin and Taylor (1992), and Teas (1993), who recommended that expectation ratings be eliminated altogether. In addition, Liljander (1994) states that there is more support for performance only models than for the disconfirmation model of service quality. Bolton and Drew (1991) stated that assessments of overall service quality are affected only by perceptions of performance levels. They suggested that direct measures of disconfirmation are more important than expectations. Boulding, Kalra, Staelin, and Zeithaml (1993) also suggested that perceptions alone influence overall service quality.Furthermore, other studies suggested that SERVQUAL has unstable dimensions. For example, Jiang, Klein, and Carr (2002) used four dimensions in their study, while Landrum and Prybutok (2004) used five. Nitecki (1996) proposed a three-dimensional SERVQUAL model, as opposed the five dimensions proposed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry in 1990. As we have noted, these issues are all resolved if customer expectations are eliminated

from the model. The performance only approach to service quality utilizes the five of the seven SERVQUAL dimensions—the five performance dimensions. Cronin and Taylor (1992), called this performance only subset instrument SERVPERF. When Cronin and Taylor (1992) compared SERVPERF to SERVQUAL, their results supported the dissenters: performance scores alone account for more variation in service quality than performance minus expectations. Performance alone provides better predictive validity than SERVQUAL which is gap-based (Brady, Cronin, & Brand, 2002; Cronin & Taylor 1992) and other studies show that performance scores alone exhibit better reliability and validity than difference scores (Babakus & Boller 1992; Brady et al., 2002; Landrum & Prybutok 2004; Landrum, Prybutok, Strutton, & Zhang, 2008). Based upon these findings, we used only performance scores to perform analysis on the five SERVQUAL service quality dimensions. We next discuss adapting the SERVQUAL instrument to library information services because the test facilities were designated by the US Army Corps of Engineers as “libraries.” Cook and Thompson (2000) investigated the reliability and validity of SERVQUAL instrument in the context of library service. They found that SERVQUAL displayed three responsive dimensions, rather than the five dimensions originally proposed by Parasuraman et al. (1988). As a result, they concluded that responsive, empathy, and assurance dimensions overlapped in this particular service domain. Nitecki and Hernon (2000) used SERVQUAL to assess library services at Yale University and found that among the five dimensions of SERVQUAL, respondents considMeasuring IS System Service Quality with SERVQUAL 20 ered reliability the most important and empathy least important among the five quality dimensions (Landrum, Prybutok, Kappelman, & Zhang, 2008).

History of SERVQUAL

SERVQUAL was introduced in 1988 by A. Parasuraman , Valarie A. Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry as an instrument for assessing customer perceptions of service quality in service and retailing organization. ( A. Parasuraman, et al., 1988) It was consisted of 22 pairs of statements ,the first of which measure the expectations of a service provider’s customers by asking each respondent to rate, on a seven-point scale, how essential each item is for an excellent service provider to deliver. The second set to 22 identical statements ascertains the respondent’s perceptions to the level of service given by the institution or organization examined. For each pair of statements, the difference between the ranked perception and the ranked expectation is calculated; the average of the gap scores is the SERVQUAL overall quality score. ( Danuta A. Nitecki and Peter Hernon, 2000). The designers also developed the Gaps model of service quality and the definitions of each of the gap are as follows :

Gap 1: The discrepancy between customers’ expectations and management’s perceptions of these expectations;Gap 2: The discrepancy between management’s perceptions of customers’ expectations and service quality specifications Gap 3: The discrepancy between service quality specifications and actual service deliveryGap 4: The discrepancy between actual service delivery and what is communicated to customers about it; andGap 5: The discrepancy between Customers’ expected services and perceived service delivered.The first four gaps are the major contributors to the service-quality gap that customers may perceive. The fifth gap is the basis of a customer-oriented definition of service quality: the

discrepancy between customers’ expectations for excellence, and their perceptions of actual service delivered. This discrepancy is the conceptual basis for the SERVQUAL instrument. ( Danuta A. Nitecki, 1996) The narrower the gap is, the better service quality is provided so the managers have to reduce Gap 5 as smallest as they can in order to provide excellent service to their customers.Later, A. Parasuraman , Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Leonard L. Berry revised SERVQUAL to ask respondents to rate statements from three contexts ( minimum service expectations, desired service expectations, and the perception of service performance) On a continuum, the minimum and desired service expectations appear at either end, with the area in between known as the Zone of Tolerance. The zone of tolerance represents the range of service performance that customers consider satisfactory. ( Peter Hernon, 2002) According to Johnson ( 1995) Berry and Parasuraman defined the zone of tolerance in terms of the customer’s evaluation of inprocess service performances ( Robert Johnson, 1995) :

The zone of tolerance is a range of service performance that a customer considers satisfactory. A performance below the tolerance zone will engender customer frustration and decrease customer loyalty. A performance level above the tolerance zone will pleasantly surprise customers and strengthen their loyalty.The importance of the zone of tolerance was clarified by Marketing consultants for MCB University Press (2000) : Consumers have two different level of expectations for service quality : desired level and one they find adequate. A “ Zone of Tolerance ” separates the two. The managers should measure both levels of expectations because the service providers can fine-tune the way they allocate resources by incorporating the zone of tolerance framework. For example, a service provider with limited resources can improve customers’ perceptions of service quality by making improvements to meet consumer’s minimum expectation levels on the most essential attributes first. The service provider can then devote more resourcesand attention to less essential attributes, and/or to better meeting desired standards.

SERVQUAL in Library Setting

The researchers of various subject areas contribute and adapt SERVQUAL as the instrument to assess service quality and also in library setting. SERVQUAL has been used in public, academic and research libraries continually. According to Rowena Cullen ( See Cullen(2001), for a useful review) the modification of SERVQUAL model was introduced to academic library managers by Hernon and Altman . They used the data collected from surveys and focus groups to refine the SERVQUAL model in order to develop a robust survey instrument for use specifically in library and information services. Two later research projects have tested the validity of the standard instrument used in the SERVQUAL model. Nitecki’s doctoral research tested the SERVQUAL instrument on the three aspects of library service- interlibrary loan, reference, and closed-reserve and concluded that the instrument was useful in determining how well services match user expectations. Hernon and Calvert tested the validity of the SERVQUAL instrument for evaluating academic libraries among library students and librarians, and came up with an instrument based on SERVQUAL. Now, there is much potential for international collaboration on assessing library service quality as seen from a cross-cultural study comparing perceptions of service quality among library users in New Zealand and China and unequivocally concluded that there are global commonalities in the way users think about library service quality.( Kyrillidou and Hipps,2001)

Concept of Service quality for Library assessment

Service quality was defined in different ways but for the concept of service quality that use for library evaluation is “ to examine the difference between a customer’s expectations and the customer’s perceived sense to actual performance.” ( Calvert, 2001) Philip J. Calvert and Peter Hernon also mentioned that : “Most typically, service quality is defined in terms of reducing the gap between user expectations and actual service provided ” ( Philip J. Calvertand Peter Hernon, 1997) Though there is ambiguity between the concept of service quality and satisfaction, Peter Hernon concluded that “ service quality focuses on the interaction between customers and service providers, and the gap or difference between expectations about service provision and perception about how the service was actually provided. Satisfaction, on the other hand, does not involve gap analysis” (Peter Hernon, 2002) According to Philip Calvert (2001), the precursors o service quality can be configured as follows:The customer1. past experience of the customers:2. word-of-mouth from other customers:3. personal needs of the customer: and4. national culture of the customer:The service provider:5. Communications (direct and indirect) about what the customer can expect.Competitors:6. service provided by other providers that acts as a benchmark.

FACTOR ANALYSIS TO REDUCE FACTORS:

KMO and Bartlett's Test

KMO and Bartlett's Test

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy. .710

Bartlett's Test of Sphericity Approx. Chi-Square 1.312E3

Df 378

Sig. .000

Screen Plot

Communalities Table:Communalities Table:

Rotated Component Matrix :

Explanation of extracted Factors

1. Collection and access : Various collections of journals , books, magazines and newspapers .

2. Tangibles : Physical facilities, equipment, an appearance of personnel.

3. Reliability : Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.

4. Responsiveness : Willingness to help students and provide prompt service.

5. Assurance : Knowledge and courtesy of library staff and their ability to inspire trust and confidence.

6. Empathy : Caring, individualized attention the library provides to students.

7. Accuracy of Information : Precision and completion of information received .

8. Courtesy : Friendliness and politeness in the conversation .

Z-test for significance of difference of means of expected and actual quality

Actual(mean) Expected(mean) Diff

Standard deviation z value

Difference b/w means

2.05 3.409938 1.359938 0.122801805 11.07425* Significant

2.55 3.099379 0.549379 0.120552638 4.55717* Significant

2.01 3.167702 1.157702 0.130503238 8.871059* Significant

2.13 3.074534 0.944534 0.127098508 7.431513* Significant

2.02 3.267081 1.247081 0.128030495 9.740498* Significant

2.29 3.074534 0.784534 0.131033302 5.987288* Significant

2.36 2.801242 0.441242 0.129703064 3.401942* Significant

2.662.776398 0.116398 0.138888007 0.838067*

Non significant

2.652.732919 0.082919 0.123628904 0.670711*

Non significant

2.82.98087 0.18087 0.135076121 1.33902*

Non significant

2.912.936646 0.026646 0.137965499 0.193135*

Non significant

2.99 3.326708 0.336708 0.120194995 2.801349* Significant

2.47 3 0.53 0.127455363 4.158319* Significant

2.25 3.416149 1.166149 0.140500715 8.299951* Significant

2.58

2.621118

0.041118 0.125082587 0.328727*

Non significant

2.682.850932 0.170932 0.098596982 1.73364*

Non significant

Alpha =.05

Conclusions

The study results reveal that all service quality attributes of desired expectations are not met. From Z-test applied on the expected and the actual quality of services it was found that there were 4factors in which the difference between the expected value and actual value was quite high .The students are not satisfied and seems there are scope of improvements in the following factors listed below.

Collection and Access Empathy Tangibles Courtesy

Recommendations

The data from user inputs reveals that this problem is a major one, the library should seek the better way for improving re -shelfing .Missing books is also another problem.

There should be an online catalogue for students through which students can check the books availability, shelf number and other features.

Library closing hours should be extended till 11.00 pm as it gives students more opportunity to take advantage of library facilities.

Library should have cubicles so that students can study without getting disturbed because of movements inside library.

Library staff should be fully acquainted with the usage of E- resources so that they can help students easily.

Bimtech library should provide automated user self served book handling facilities . There should be a RFID (Radio frequency identification ) for each book and with latest technological advanced equipments so that we can improve the daily processes of issuing and returning of books .

. Self issue and returning Book equipments

Computers available in library are very slow , periodic checks should be done by library staff to check the proper functioning of systems by checking the system for viruses for optimum performance of system.

There should be proper shelves inside the library to keep the bags of visitors/ students

Subscriptions of business magazines (BuisnessToday ,Business outlook etc) should be given importance and the latest editions should be displayed in the shelves. The number of subscriptions should be increased.

The number of subscriptions for newspaper should be increased .

APPENDIX

Questionnaire 1

Survey on the Service Quality of Bimtech Library

Questionnaire 2

Survey on Improving service quality at Bimtech library

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