Service Quality: Construct Comprehension And Evolution Over Time | Ekta Duggal & Harsh V Verma

Increased competition and rise of demanding customer in the eighties forced service firms to explore ways to develop an edge over rivals through their marketing efforts. This was further accentuated by the emergence of service as the most dominant sector of economies worldwide. As a result managerial and academic thinking turned to quality, a concept which has for long belonged to goods production domain. Quality as a construct is very old in goods manufacturing context, but its conception took place much later in services. This paper is based on a chronological study of service quality construct and its evolution over time. The study was motivated by the aim of apprehending the pattern in the emergence of service quality literature. The academic literature spanning over four decades on service quality and its content analysis reveals three stages of its evolution: initial articulation, re-articulation, expansion and empirical investigation and verification of quality in specific services.