Service Quality Assessment Based on Customer Satisfaction in International Freight Forwarding Industry: An Empirical Study in East Asia

The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of freight forwarders and explore the quality function deployment (QFD) in terms of quality management technique. Freight forwarder business is mainly characterized by lower capital investment and entry barrier comparing with a shipping line. Freight forwarders usually work closely with shipping or airline companies as intermediary agent and their major customers are small or medium size manufactures or traders. Providing the quality service to enhance customer satisfaction is the key mission since every company provides similar service and the competition is extremely severe especially after global economic crisis. The QFD is one of the distinctive procedures to describe the requirements of customer and transform them into managerial missions by cross-relations evaluation between customer requirements and technical measures. The relative weight of each customer requirement would be calculated by applying fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Furthermore, the feature of the study by using QFD approach would not only identify key technical measures but also explore meaningful business solution as direction of quality improvement. The empirical study is performed to investigate service quality of freight forwarding industry by focusing on a group of anonymous leading forwarders in East Asia. In conclusion part, we would explore the empirical result and managerial meaning for decision making.