Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Canadian and Indian consumers' national cultural orientations and banking service quality expectations. Using two of Hofstede's five cultural dimensions operationalized at the individual level, and five dimensions of service quality from Parasuraman et al.'s SERVQUAL scale, the aim is to develop and test hypotheses relating national culture values to service quality expectations. Design/methodology/approach -The study is quantitative in nature, using surveys (online and written) from respondents in Canada and India. Data were analyzed using dummy variable regression and structural equation modeling. Findings -The results show that the importance of various SERVQUAL dimensions is related to Hofstede's power distance and individualism cultural dimensions both at the individual and national levels. More specifically, consumers low on power distance expect highly responsive and reliable service. High power distance customers attach higher importance to tangible service attributes. Consumers high on individualism expect lower empathy and assurance from service providers. Furthermore, Indian consumers attach higher importance to tangible attributes, whereas Canadian consumers find service reliability more important. However, differences in overall service quality expectations are not significantly different across the two countries. Practical implications -The results suggest that managers must be aware of the cultural values of the buyer/client in order to fully understand the most effective means of establishing and nurturing the service delivery process and, consequently, establishing service quality expectations. Banks will be more successful when service delivery is in tune with cultural imperatives, particularly sub-group cultural imperatives. Originality/value -The study provides an original insight into the manner in which national culture impacts on service quality expectations. Furthermore, the study identifies individual sub-cultural influences that shape service quality expectations.
Introduction: Questionnaire based assessment is a simple, scientific tool to collect responses from individuals and standardised questionnaires can be used to assess health care quality of a health care institution. The aim of this study was to assess health service quality of a private hospital on the basis of questionnaire-based data collected from the patients admitted in the hospital using service quality (SERVQUAL) questionnaire method.
Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study was conducted in 203 adult patients in Fishtail Hospital and Research Centre, Pokhara, Nepal from January 2015 to January 2016. The response of the patients towards various aspects of service provided by the hospital was collected using SERVQUAL questionnaire. The data was graded in Likert scale and SPSS software 24 was utilized to analyse the data.
Results: A total of 181(89.12%) patients were satisfied with the health service quality provided by the hospital that was assessed on the basis of parameters of SERVQUAL questionnaire and 156 (76.74%) patients graded various hospital factors as being good.
Conclusions: Based on SERVQUAL questionnaire we found that 89.12% of patients were satisfied with the service provided by our hospital and 76.74% of patients graded various hospital factors such as doctors, nurses, reception staff and food provided in canteen as being good. We recommend such surveys should be regularly performed in health care institutions to scrutinise and enhance the level of health care service quality.
Governments of any country, province or state propagate information about their various development programmes and activities of the government through a variety of media. The effectiveness of communication is critical as it determines the success of such government programmes. This also plays a vital role in building a strong and lasting government-citizen relationship. Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) involves an optimum utilisation of activities such as advertising, public relations, sponsorship of events and exhibitions in a synergistic manner to build a durable customer relationship. In India, both central and state governments operate programmes for the development of urban and rural areas. This research aims at investigating the nature and extent to which IMC is utilised for (i) promoting rural development programmes in the northern state of UP; and (ii) fostering government-citizen relationship. The perception of customers (citizens) was captured through a survey and the government view was captured through interaction with officials. Research reveals that the government employs multiple media for informing and communicating about the self-employment generation schemes to the rural population. There are complementarities in the messages that are propagated but they lack in consistency. Integration of customers in the communication process and strategies may remove such inconsistencies, which is the suggestion the research has come out with.
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