Faculty of Management Sciences
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Item Service failure and service recovery strategies in the context of higher education : a provincial perspective in South Africa(2019) Msosa, Steven Kayambazinthu; Govender, Jeevarathnam ParthasarathyIn recent times, service failure and service recovery have gained the attention of marketing practitioners and scholars because of their significance to the marketing philosophy. However, the focus has been in sectors that have low exit barriers or switching costs for customers and little attention has been paid to sectors with high switching costs, specifically, the higher education sector. The current study seeks to address this gap in the literature. The overall aim of this study is to explore student perception of service failure and service recovery strategies in higher education. A quantitative research approach was adopted and data were collected by means of a modified service recovery self-administered questionnaire. This research encompasses a quantitative, descriptive and cross-sectional study. A purposive sampling technique was adopted to select 430 full-time registered students across three public universities viz. University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN), Durban University of Technology (DUT) and University of Zululand (UNIZULU). Data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 24.0 and Smart Partial Least Square (PLS). Customer perception of service recovery strategies was assessed and the results show that students were satisfied with an explanation and dissatisfied with the speed, empowerment, compensation and apology of the service recovery process. Similarly, student perception of distributive and interactional justice was satisfactory, whereas the majority of the students expressed dissatisfaction with procedural justice. Furthermore, relationships between several variables were evaluated and significant findings that emerged from the correlation analysis were corroborated by previous studies. The study recommended to the management of higher education institutions to offer training to customer-facing employees to enhance their problem- solving, listening, customer service and communication skills. The results also suggest that students prefer interactional justice to achieve recovery satisfaction rather than distributive justice. The practical implication is that managers of institutions should prioritise the use of apology and explanation to foster recovery satisfaction. The study further provides a service recovery model (SERVREC) as a tool for marketing practitioners and institutional managers to address service failure. Future research should be commissioned across many public universities in other provinces or nationally using a large sample size and a longitudinal study.Item Assessing customer service quality in banking by an alternative service provider: An African perpective(HOEHERE BUNDESLEHRANSTALT UND BUNDESAMT FUER WEIN- UND OBSTBAU, 2015-09) Govender, Jeevarathnam Parthasarathy; Msosa, Steven KayambazinthuAchieving service quality has been the goal of many organisations over the past decade. ln recent times, the postal business across the world has experienced a sharp decline in the volume of mail due to more efficient alternative channels of communication. The dwindling volumes of mail have made it necessary for public postal operators to diversify into financial services as one way of generating more revenue. However, the influx of many players into the financial service industry has raised the standard of service quality as a tool for business growth and sustainability and as a result, there is no room for mediocre perfom1ance. This paper examines customer perceptions of service quality in the Malawian public postal service. A survey comprising a sample of 400 financial services customers was conducted using the SERVPERF model as the measuring instrument. The results show that customer perceptions of the service quality dimensions are satisfactory. There were significant differences between education level and the perceptions of tangibles and reliability and between region and the perception of tangibles. There were no significant differences between gender, age and occupation and the perception of empathy, tangibles, assurance, reliability and responsiveness. Recommendations are proposed on how the public postal operator can improve service quality among its financial services customers. This study can prove useful as a basis for comparison of customer service quality by altemative providers of banking services in other under-developed countries.Item Assessing customer service in the Malawian public postal service(2015) Msosa, Steven Kayambazinthu; Govender, Jeevarathnam ParthasarathyAchieving customer satisfaction has been the goal of every organisation. In recent times, the postal business world over has experienced a sharp decline in the volume of mail due to more efficient alternative channels of communication. The dwindling volumes of mail have necessitated that public postal operators diversify into financial services as one way of generating more revenue. The Malawi Posts Corporation (MPC) is faced with challenges ranging from cash scarcity, increasing competition from banks and other financial services players like mobile phone companies. At the same time, the customer in the modern age is well informed and demanding high quality service. As such, the MPC needs to ensure that customers remain satisfied with the quality standards being delivered in its network. The importance of achieving service quality and satisfaction are enormous. High quality service and customer satisfaction are tools for competitiveness, productivity and profitability. The aim of this study is to analyse service quality in the Malawian public postal service. A modified SERVPERF questionnaire was used to assess customers’ perception of service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The service quality dimensions of tangibles, reliability, empathy, assurance and responsiveness were used to evaluate customers’ perception of service quality. The 400 respondents were selected using convenience sampling and the eight Post Offices where this research was conducted were selected using purposive or judgemental sampling. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse data. Spearman rho was used to ascertain the relationship between variables. Man-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare differences between two independent variables. The findings of this study show that customers’ perception of service quality was generally good across all the five service quality dimensions and that all the dimensions of service quality have a positive relationship with customer satisfaction. In addition, the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty was found to be positive and significant. Recommendations are made in respect of improving the service quality dimensions because they have a direct impact on customer satisfaction which in turn affects customer loyalty.