Implementing Total Quality Management in the Classroom by Means of Student Satisfaction Guarantees

Lawrence, John J.; McCollough, Michael A.

doi:10.1080/1478336032000149063

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Explicit service guarantees are found in many firms across a wide variety of industries (Anon., 2002(Anon., , 2003aHoward and Crompton, 2004;Lawrence and McCollough, 2004;McCaskey and Symes, 2004;Paterik, 2002;Sarel, 2001;Taylor, 2004;Wolff, 2004). However, the mere existence of an explicit service guarantee does not insure that a firm has excellent service or that its customers are delighted with that service (Downs, 2003;Sharpsteen, 2000); similarly, the lack of an explicit guarantee does not necessarily mean that the service organization is not serious about keeping its promises to its customers.…”

Section: Service Guarantee Strengthmentioning

confidence: 95%

Service Guarantee Strength: The key to service quality

Hays

Hill

2005

J of Ops Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While most authors describe a service guarantee as a ''zero-one variable'' indicating the presence or absence of an explicit written service guarantee, this paper develops a construct called ''Service Guarantee Strength'' (SGS) that is a continuous variable. This construct measures the degree to which a firm sets clear service quality standards for itself on dimensions that customers care about, and has an formal policy for quickly giving meaningful compensation to customers when these standards are not met.The paper builds upon established micro-level behavioral theory to develop the ''Service Guarantee Strength Framework''. This framework posits that high Service Guarantee Strength leads to improved service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty through three intervening variables-marketing communications impact, employee motivation and vision, and learning through service failure.An empirical investigation was conducted to test the SGS Framework using both employee and customer data from three pairs of firms, with each pair in a different industry. None of these firms had an explicit service guarantee. Unlike many behavioral research studies, this study measured both employee and customer perceptual data and compared the two. The research finds that Service Guarantee Strength is positively related to customer perceptions of service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. #

show abstract

Section: Service Guarantee Strengthmentioning

confidence: 95%

Service Guarantee Strength: The key to service quality

Hays

Hill

2005

J of Ops Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A way of increasing the universities' perceived service orientation towards their partners or co-creators of value without allowing students to influence the curriculum or ask for good grades could be the introduction of "student contracts" (Rowley, 1997) or "student satisfaction guarantees" (McCollough & Gremler, 1999ab;Gremler & McCollough, 2002;Lawrence & McCollough, 2004). A student satisfaction guarantee, for example, could tangibilise the offered educational services and signal the quality of the educational experience to current students and also help attract new students.…”

Section: Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it would not be in the interest of universities and the wider society to allow students for example to dictate what topics the curriculum should include or what grades they should receive, even if students want that (Clayson & Haley, 2005). We therefore agree with Desai et al (2001, p. 143) who posit that professors can be more service oriented "without giving the store away".A way of increasing the universities' perceived service orientation towards their partners or co-creators of value without allowing students to influence the curriculum or ask for good grades could be the introduction of "student contracts" (Rowley, 1997) or "student satisfaction guarantees" (McCollough & Gremler, 1999ab;Gremler & McCollough, 2002;Lawrence & McCollough, 2004). A student satisfaction guarantee, for example, could tangibilise the offered educational services and signal the quality of the educational experience to current students and also help attract new students.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the characteristics of effective professors: the student's perspective

Gruber

Reppel

Voss

2010

Journal of Marketing for Higher Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ABSTRACT. Increasingly, higher education institutions are realizing that higher education could be regarded as a business-like service industry and they are beginning to focus more on meeting or even exceeding the needs of their students. Recent research findings suggest that the factors that create student satisfaction with teaching ("teaching satisfiers") may be qualitatively differently from the factors that create dissatisfaction with teaching. Thus, this research uses the Kano Methodology to reveal the characteristics of professors that students take for granted ("Must-be factors") and that have the potential to delight them ("Excitement factors"). Kano questionnaires containing nineteen attributes of effective professors taken from previous studies and focus group discussions were handed out in two marketing courses to 63 postgraduate students enrolled in a service marketing course. The Kano results corroborate previous US findings that revealed the importance of personality in general and support studies that stress the importance of professors creating rapport with their students in particular.Keywords: Student Satisfaction, Educational Services, Quality Attributes, Effective Professors, Kano Methodology CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE PROFESSORS 2 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUNDIncreasingly, higher education institutions are realizing that higher education could be regarded as a business-like service industry and they are beginning to focus more on meeting or even exceeding the needs of their students. Watson (2003) and Narasimhan (2001) for example maintain that fee-paying students expect "value for money" and behave more like customers. As students are increasingly seen as customers of higher education services (e.g. Arambewela et al., 2005;Maringe, 2005), their satisfaction should be important to institutions that want to retain existing and recruit new students (Helgesen & Nesset, 2007). Study results indicate that the recruitment of students is several times more expensive than their retention (Joseph et al., 2005).Universities should therefore try to monitor students' levels of satisfaction and decrease sources of dissatisfaction if possible in order to retain students (Douglas et al., 2008). Similarly, Appleton- Knapp & Krentler (2006) suggest that students' satisfaction with their educational experience should be a desired outcome, in addition to learning and knowing what attributes of professors are desired by students, may improve the overall education process (Faranda & Clarke, 2004).Given the need for more research on classroom service encounters , this research study is exploratory in nature. This paper explores how students perceive the attributes of professors and how satisfied they are with them. In particular, the research examines which attributes of professors are likely to cause satisfaction and which dimensions predominately lead to dissatisfaction. Knowing what students regard as satisfactory and dissatisfactory attributes helps professors improve the classroom experience either by improv...

show abstract

“…Universities might also consider the introduction of "student contracts" (Rowley, 1997) or "student satisfaction guarantees" (McCollough and Gremler, 1999ab;Gremler and McCollough, 2002;Lawrence and McCollough, 2004) to manage student expectations effectively. A student satisfaction guarantee, for example, could tangibilise the offered educational services and signal the quality of the educational experience to current students and also help attract new students.…”

Section: Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which classroom service encounters make students happy or unhappy?

Voss

Gruber

Reppel

2010

International Journal of Educational Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

PurposeThis paper aims to explore satisfactory and dissatisfactory student‐professor encounters in higher education from a student's perspective. The critical incident technique (CIT) is used to categorise positive and negative student‐professor interactions and to reveal quality dimensions of professors.Design/methodology/approachAn exploratory study using an online application of the well‐established CIT method was conducted. The study took place at a large European university. A total of 96 students took part in the study on a voluntary basis and reported 164 incidents. Respondents were aged between 19 and 24 years (x=23.2) and slightly more female students (52 per cent) filled in the online CIT questionnaire than male students (48 per cent). On average, every student provided 1.7 incidents.FindingsThe results of the critical incident sorting process support previous classification systems that used three major groups to thoroughly represent the domain of (un)satisfactory student‐professor encounters. The results of the CIT study also revealed ten quality dimensions of professors, corroborating previous research in this area.Research limitations/implicationsOwing to the exploratory nature of the study and the scope and size of its student sample, the results outlined are tentative in nature. The research study also only investigates the experiences of one stakeholder group.Practical implicationsGaining knowledge of students' classroom experiences should be beneficial for professors to design their teaching programmes. Based on the results, universities might consider the introduction of student contracts or student satisfaction guarantees to manage student expectations effectively.Originality/valueThe paper was the first to successfully apply an online version of the CIT techniques to the issue of higher education services. This paper shows that the CIT method is a useful tool for exploring student‐professor encounters in higher education. The paper has hopefully opened up an area of research and methodology that could reap considerable further benefits for researchers interested in this area.

show abstract

Implementing Total Quality Management in the Classroom by Means of Student Satisfaction Guarantees

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Service Guarantee Strength: The key to service quality

Service Guarantee Strength: The key to service quality

Understanding the characteristics of effective professors: the student's perspective

Which classroom service encounters make students happy or unhappy?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About