抄録
Though the increasing importance of the service sector has focused attention on the quality of services as well as products, few empirical studies have been made on service quality and its evaluation. In this study, to determine factors by which consumers evaluate services, a multi-stage survey is made of four representative mass-market services. First, attributes constituting quality are determined for each service, and then consumer expectations for their improvement are surveyed. Factor analysis is applied to obtain latent evaluation factors which are compared between service categories. Evaluation factors representing function, completeness, ease of use, and emotion/environment are found to be quite universal. An additional factor representing assurance was also found for services considered to have a high degree of function-related variability or risk. It is shown that individual consumer's factor scores for these evaluation factors have significant correlation across service categories. Examination is also made of the relationship between respondent attributes and usage patterns and the derived evaluation factors.
