The study of perceptional gap in service quality by using AHP method-a case study on a dental clinic group

• Main Authors: Chien-Hung Chen, 陳建宏
• Other Authors: Thuen-Ho Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/19429107927608107946

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 行銷與流通管理所 === 92 === Service has become the trend for global industry. Especially to professional service providers, such as accountants, engineers, doctors and dentists, due to the increasing competition in service market, the diminishing of consumer loyalty and the increasing of self-conscience on consumer rights, the clients have become more demanding on service quality nowadays. Most of the researchers used SURVQUAL model developed by Parasurman et al. to measure service quality in the past, but a lot of scholars have proposed a multidimensional, hierarchical model to measure service quality in recent year. Therefore, the study attempt to use AHP as basis to develop a service quality measurement model and apply in dental service. However, since the weights of alternatives in Saaty’s AHP sometimes to close to difficult decide the final rankings for alternatives, so the study applies Monte Carlo simulation to overcome this problem. The study conducts an empirical research in a dental clinic group after evaluation model developed. The study surveys perceptions to the quality attributes of dental service for dentists and patients in the same time. The results for the survey are: the perceptional gap exists in some quality attributes for dentists and patients; the three important quality attributes for patients are “symptom relief”, “waiting time before treatment” and “ease of making appointment”; the dentists’ operational performance is negative corrlative with the perceptional gaps of “symptom relief”, “method of pain control”, “hours of operation” and “professional competence” between dentists and patients. The study also uses the hierarchy for dental service quality developed by this research to elect the service benchmarking clinic. Moreover, in order to improve service quality for non-benchmarking clinics, the study obtains the sensitivity for all quality attributes of dental service through sensitivity test. Keywords: AHP, Monte Carlo simulation, service quality