Defining service quality index preferences in a service industry using Analytic Hierarchy process

The balance between customer expectations and company´s commitment to customer service is important for business success. Service industries increasingly encounter many intangible factors alongside the tangible objects. Intangible factors such as innovative ideas, new service attributes, learning principles and self-service technologies have great impacts on business success and customer satisfaction. However, these attributes are versatile, associated with service personnel action, customer relation, service practices, self-service technologies, service information and relationship with trade partners. Therefore, evaluation of these attributes to prioritize service effort and resource allocation to improve the service performance is believed to be a Multi Criteria Decision Making problem which has grown significantly in past decades. Researchers have proposed several effective ways to quantify service quality attributes assigning relative weights to important quality attributes that the service industry offers to retail customers, trade partners and business outlet. In the present study the Analytic Hierarchy Process is adopted to establish a local and global hierarchical priorities among different categories of service quality attributes. Ranking the attributes drives a service quality index between and within two hierarchical levels. An empirical illustration provides various managerial and resource allocation implications to improve service quality responsive action.