Abstract:

The main purpose of the research is the development of the comprehensive approach to the service quality assessment in the organization that enables to select the consumer properties and quality indicatiors of the services to be assessed and to choose methods of quality evaluation and analysis of observations made.

The research is based on the comparative analysis of the theoretical and methodological approaches, practical experiences and normative documents in the field of service quality assessment. The authors implement the goal-oriented approach to the design of service quality assessment system. It presupposes that evaluation objectives allow to determine the structure of objects to be assessed and their distinctive properties, to define the scale and methods of the research.

Within the research authors made the following assumptions:
1. The service quality assessment is based on the comparative analysis;
2. As the control object any service includes two elements – the outcome (output) and the service process;
3. The service properties are to be divided in two groups – the identity properties and the evaluation properties.

Authors propose the methodology of comparative evaluation of service quality which could be implemented to answer the following purposes:
1. Assessment of organization/department performance;
2. The identification of the areas for improvement;
3. Development of the customer relationship management;
4. The internal and external conformity evaluation;
5. Comparative analysis with the competitors performance and market value.

The methodology embraces 12 stages of service quality assessment:
1. The definition of the assessment objectives;
2. The identification of the assessment objects;
3. Service identification;
4. The determination of the service process stages;
5. The specification of the service consumer properties structure;
6. The elaboration of service quality coefficients system;
7. Testing of service quality coefficients system;
8. The estimation of the reference values of the service quality coefficients;
9. The selection of the methods of quality evaluation and analysis of observations;
10. The information accumulation and estimation of factual values of the service quality coefficients;
11. The comparison of the reference and factual values of the service quality coefficients;
12. The analysis of the quality evaluation results.

It was determined that the following principles can form an integrated methodology for service quality assessment: the use of quantitative assessment of the service quality; comparative assessment that requires to conduct it basing on a comparison of actual and regulated (reference, target) values of the quality indicators; focused assessment that requires the selection of nomenclature of the assessed indicators, depending on the objectives of the study; completeness and adequacy, which requires a concentration on the measurement of several key indicators; consumers focus; decentralization; adaptability; scientifically proved assessment; continuity.

Keywords:

Assessment, service, quality, consumer properties, identification, quality coefficient.