Service Quality Assessment: a Case Study of a Singapore Statutory Board Library

The assessment of service quality provides an important feedback for libraries to assess and improve its services to its users. This paper reports the use of an adapted SERVQUAL instrument to measure the service quality of a special library (a statutory board library). The SERVQUAL instrument, developed by marketing researchers based on the Gap Model, states that the service shortfalls experienced by customers are the results of four gaps that exist within the organisation. The 22-item SERVQUAL instrument, measuring the five service dimensions of Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, and Empathy, was administered to a sample of library users during a 15-day data collection period. In the data analysis, the Expectation-Service Gap Grid was used to identify service shortfalls under these five dimensions. This paper concludes with recommendations for improvement and suggestions for future research. INTRODUCTION Many studies have concluded that quality service has quantifiable impact on customer retention, market share and profitability in the commercial world. However, in the non-commercial world, quality also plays an important role. The Library 2000 report (Singapore. Library 2000 Review Committee, 1994) identified improving the quality of services as one of the six strategic thrusts for public libraries in the next ten years. Quality management also plays a part in academic and special libraries even though these libraries seem to have a group of captive customers. Academic libraries have to provide quality service to the academic community as the same community evaluates their worth and hence the size of funding. As for special libraries in public and private sector organisations, they need to convince their users and/or those controlling the budget that they are responsive to changes and are providing quality service, or be at risk of resource and budget cuts. DEFINITION OF SERVICE QUALITY ‘Quality’ means different things to different people. Garvin (1988) discussed five approaches to defining quality: (1) Transcendent-based quality (2) Product-based quality