Volume 15 Issue 2 (August) 2020

Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: Experience of Customers

in Postal Service
Siti Rapidah Omar Ali1*, Siti Naemah Abd Hakim Amir2
1,2
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Terengganu, Kampus
Dungun, 23000 Dungun, Terengganu, Malaysia

Authors’ Email Address: *[email protected]

Received Date: 26 April 2020

Accepted Date: 13 May 2020
Published Date: 31 July 2020

ABSTRACT
Providing great quality services is essential for a sustainable competitive advantage in today’s aggressive
business environment. An organisation’s success could be positively influenced by customer satisfaction.
This study has attempted to examine the relationship between service-quality elements towards customer
satisfaction. The modified SERVQUAL model by Parasuraman et al. has been used to measure four service-
quality dimensions. Quantitative method is used for data collection in this research. A set of a self-
administered questionnaire focused on customers of Pos Malaysia Centre in Kuala Terengganu was
distributed and has collected a convenience sample of 322 Pos Malaysia customers. Pearson’s correlation
analysis has revealed that all the four service-quality elements are positively associated with customer
satisfaction with a moderate correlation. All the hypotheses of the study are also supported. Responsiveness
and reliability have been discovered to influence customer satisfaction most compared to the other
elements. Therefore, these findings have suggested that service industries, particularly postal services,
should cultivate the key service-quality elements thoroughly in order to enhance customer satisfaction
without overlooking the remaining dimensions.

Keywords: Service quality, customer satisfaction, SERVQUAL, postal

INTRODUCTION

The most significant aspect in the business world whether it is intended for products or services is customer
satisfaction. Customer views are perceived as service delivery that aids as a standard against which a
performance is judged (Veronica, Jacqueline, & Mellisa, 2015). They contribute to a better success, lower
costs, and customer trustworthiness. Measuring service quality, as seen from the customers’ eyes, is
complex (Arora & Arora, 2015). The ability of the service industry to influence aggressive improvement
can be realised from better service quality. Service quality is in fact a quality of service when customers,
users, or clients measure alongside their expectancies before purchasing products or services (Kant &
Jaiswl, 2017).

In today’s challenging service-business world, it is imperative for every business to give its very best service
quality in order to strive and please its customers. To make a business organisation successful in the long
run, customers continuously play a vital role. As stated by Dahari, Abduh, and Fam (2015), to increase
ISSN: 2231-7716 / E-ISSN 2682-9223
DOI: http://10.24191/ ji.v15i2.308
Copyright © Universiti Teknologi MARA
 Siti Rapidah Omar Ali, Siti Naemah Abd Hakim Amir
Jurnal Intelek Vol. 15, Issue 2 (Aug) 2020

customers’ trust and be able to last, service quality is a need in every establishment. Customers’ lifestyles
and consumption forms support companies to deliver better service quality. Apart from that, service quality
also emphasises efforts to satisfy customers’ needs and the precision of delivery to balance customer
expectation (Ali & Raza, 2015).

Postal service or the logistic service industry is also expected to provide valuable service quality to its
customers. In providing high-quality services to customers, like other business trades, this industry also
faces challenges. It is important to consider that service quality and customer satisfaction are closely linked.
Organisations that offer a higher level of service quality will receive higher customer satisfaction
(Jayaraman, Shankar, & Hor, 2011). Customers is the most important asset and if service quality is taken
as an essential part of an organisation, customer satisfaction can be maintained (Naem, Adeel, Hammad,
Wasim, & Tayyaba, 2016). Thus, giving the attention to existing customers is more profitable and covers
least costs than attracting new customers. Customers’ positive words to their relatives, friends, and family
may influence customers buying products and services constantly as well as delivering good
recommendations for the future enhancement of a company. In contrast, disappointed customers possibly
change to other service providers or criticise if their services are lower than the customers’ expectations.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Service quality

The service industry determines service quality as perceived by the ‘eyes’ of customers, which is
complicated (Arora & Arora, 2015). Capability in giving better service quality can aid service trades to
achieve aggressive improvement. Basically, customers’ expectations of a service and how they perceive
the performance of it is unalike with service quality. The idea of service quality remains a significant
research area in marketing since it delivers valuable understandings on how customers’ perceptions of
services are (Joshi & Chadha, 2016; Kiumarsi, 2015).

As stated by Kumar (2018), delivering services is a continuous method of communication between

services providers and their customers. Offering premium service quality in the service industry has been
claimed to be crucial to gain a competitive advantage (Muala, 2016). Muala (2016) and Ngo and Nguyen
(2016) have argued that customers’ happiness is completely reliant on their observations and views
concerning service quality after undergoing it. As mentioned by Kant and Jaiswal (2017) and Kumar (2018),
there is a considerable relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality. The most common
model used for determining service quality and customer satisfaction in service industries is SERVQUAL
(Roslan et al., 2015; Gencer & Akkucuk, 2017). The model has been much widely used than other models
since it is consistent, valid, and extensively applicable within service-sector organisations (Munusamy et
al., 2010; Gencer & Akkucuk, 2017).

Reliability

The capability of service providers to offer committed products and services constantly and
truthfully can be described as term reliability (Ngo & Nguyen, 2016). Provided reliable services will lead
to customer satisfaction. Reliability refers to the efficient attainment of advantage assurance in a correct
way, for example, giving speedy and safe interactions, a wide variation of items, and opening additional
counters during peak time. The greatest thing influencing consumer satisfaction is the speediness of
exchange (Janahi & Almubarak, 2017).

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Responsiveness

Responsiveness includes services timeliness. Apart from that, responsiveness is also associated
with considerate customers’ wants, needs, and desires, staff consideration to customers, suitable operating
hours, attending and solving customers’ problems appropriately, as well as security and ease of transactions
(Izogo & Ogba, 2015). Responsiveness is considered as the willingness of service providers in providing
assistance. It comprises the ease of managements (El Saghier & Nathan, 2013). Additionally, it embraces
seeing requests and needs of customers, useful working hours, remarkable consideration given by staff, and
customers’ well-being. Alnsour et al. (2014) have revealed in their previous study that responsiveness
displays an important relationship with customer satisfaction.

Empathy

Empathy concerns about customer attention, wants, and problems, as well as efficiently tackling
their desires, lesioning to the problems appropriately, caring, and resolving them (Izogo & Ogba, 2015).
Rishi, Deepak, and Suyash (2017) have suggested that empathy embraces giving customers outstanding
services, recognises the customers’ preferences, and provides ease of doing-business hours. In addition,
Alnsour et al. (2014) have stated that empathy is found to have a connection with customer satisfaction.

Assurance

Safety and guarantee by service providers can be defined as assurance. Kindness, validity, security,
and capability are also included as the elements in assurance. The crucial aspects about assurance when
customers receive services are knowledge and politeness of employees. Besides, the capability of
employees to form confidence and trust in customers also matters (Izogo & Ogba, 2015).

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is defined as a customer’s pleasure or dissatisfaction which is created after

the evaluation of a perceived service-quality performance and actual service delivered (Kotler et al., 2017).
This assessment is also created based on a customers’ pre-purchase comparison and expectation towards a
real service carried out (Rao & Sahu, 2013). Hence, when a service offered fulfils a customer’s need,
satisfaction is formed, whereas disappointment is resulted from the failure of a service provider’s
performance versus customer expectation (Kim-Soon et al., 2014).

Customer satisfaction is a long-term key success for businesses (Arsanam & Yousapronpaiboon,
2014). To maintain and gain customer satisfaction, as well as to withstand its market shares, organisations
are required to offer quality-based products and services (Khan & Fasih, 2014). Quality service delivery to
customers provides businesses an opportunity to compare and distinguish themselves in extremely
competitive markets (Muala, 2016).

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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Reliability
Responsiveness
Assurance Customer satisfaction
Empathy

Independent Variables Dependent Variable

Figure 1: The theoretical framework of the SERVQUAL model and customer satisfaction

Figure 1 shows the proposed framework modified from the Parasuraman et al. (1991). The purpose of this
study is to examine the influence of service quality elements, which are reliability, responsiveness,
assurance, and empathy, towards customer satisfaction. Four hypotheses which have been established to be
tested are as follows:

H1: Reliability positively influences customer satisfaction.

H2: Responsiveness positively influences customer satisfaction.
H3: Empathy positively influences customer satisfaction.
H4: Assurance positively influences customer satisfaction.

METHODOLOGY

Items and Dimension

A self-administered questionnaire is the instrument for this study. The questionnaire is employed
by using the modified SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1991) model version that has been reduced into
four dimensions, which are reliability, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance. The questionnaire consists
of six sections. Section A consists of questions concerning the demographic background of the respondents.
Sections B until E require the respondents to answer the questions regarding service-quality elements,
namely reliability, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance respectively. The last section of the
questionnaire concerns about customer satisfaction.

Population and sampling

This study used the convenient sampling technique. Customers who are currently living in Kuala
Terengganu and have experienced using various services at Pos Malaysia Centre Kuala Terengganu were
the respondents of this study. The target customers of Pos Malaysia Centre Kuala Terengganu have been
projected to be almost 2,000 individuals per month. Hence, the sample of 360 customers has been chosen
from the 2,000 population by using the Krejcie and Morgan sample size determination (1970).

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FINDINGS

Demographic

Out of 360 questionnaires distributed, 322 sets were returned, which is equal to 89.44%, and the
response rate is considered very good. More than half of the respondents (65.2%) are female while the rest
are male. The majority of the respondents are Malay. In terms of marital status, 53.8% of the respondents
are single whereas 42.5% are married. The highest age group of the respondents ranges from 21-29 years
old. 33.2% of the respondents are self-employed, while others are students, officers, and people doing other
occupations. 54.3% of the respondents use services at Pos Malaysia Centre Kuala Terengganu 1-2 times
per month, followed by 24.5% of them who frequently use its services 3-6 times per month.

Reliability

The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was applied to compute the result in order to establish the extent
to which the contents of the questionnaires had been reliable in producing correct responses.

Table 1: Reliability Analysis

Section No. of Item Alpha Value

B (A. Reliability) 5 0.892
B (B. Responsiveness) 5 0.892
C (A. Empathy) 5 0.878
C (B. Assurance) 5 0.890
D (Customer Satisfaction) 5 0.890

The table above indicates the Cronbach’s Alpha reliability for all the variables. The result shows
that the values are all above 0.6. Sekaran (2016) has stated that reliabilities of less than 0.6 are considered
to be poor, 0.7 are acceptable, and above 0.8 are good. Thus, the reliability of the variables used in this is
consistent and reliable since all the values are higher than 0.70 (Wulan & Husaeni, 2015).

Correlation Analysis

Table 2: Correlation Analysis (n=322)

Pearson’s
No Variable Mean Standard Deviation
Correlation
1. Reliability 2.0832 .60966 .698**
2. Responsiveness 2.0106 .84384 .699**
3. Empathy 2.2919 .63400 .678**
4. Assurance 1.9720 .72719 .664**
5. Customer Satisfaction 1.8397 .68647 -
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Correlations are used to explain the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two
variables (Pallant, 2011). Pearson’s correlation was used to investigate a relationship between service-
quality determinants and customer satisfaction. Table 2 shows that all the correlation values are in a range
between 0.664 and 0.699. The finding indicated that there is a positive correlation between the independent
variables and dependent variable.

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Table 3: Guilford’s Rule of Thumb

R Strength of Relationship
<0.20 Almost negotiable relationship
0.20 – 0.40 Low correlation; definite but small relationship
0.40 – 0.70 Moderate correlation; substantial relationship
0.70 – 0.90 High correlation; marked relationship

According to the Guilford’s rule of thumb, the relationship between reliability, responsiveness,
empathy, and assurance towards customer satisfaction represents a moderate, significant relationship.

Regression Analysis

Regression analysis is a modelling technique used to investigate a relationship between

independent variables and a dependent variable. The percentage of the dependent variable enlightened by
the independent variables can be measured by the regression analysis.

Table 4: Model Summary

R R Square Adjusted R Square Std. Error of the Estimate

.794a .631 .626 .51584

The influence of the four variables, namely reliability, responsiveness, empathy, and assurance,
were tested by using regression. The percentage of variance in the dependent variable (customer
satisfaction), which is explained by the variation in the independent variables, is described by the R square.
Thus, it was found that 63.1% of the variance in customer satisfaction can be influenced by reliability,
responsiveness, empathy, and assurance. In the meantime, the remaining 36.9% of the model was not
enlightened by the independent variables in this study.

Table 5: Coefficient

Independent Variables Beta Coefficient

Reliability 0.280
Responsiveness 0.289
Empathy 0.087
Assurance 0.262
Sig. F value 0.000
Note: significant levels: **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05

Table 5 illustrates that responsiveness (ß = 0.289, p < 0.05) significantly influences customer
satisfaction, followed by reliability (ß = 0.280, p < 0.05), assurance (ß = 0.262, p < 0.05), and empathy (ß
= 0.087, p < 0.05). Therefore, all the four hypotheses formulated for this study are supported.

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DISCUSSION

This study has led the researcher to observe the relationship between service quality and customer
satisfaction while using services at Pos Malaysia Centre Kuala Terengganu. The Pearson’s correlation
results demonstrate that all service-quality aspects are positively correlated with customer satisfaction. The
findings are supported by previous studies that have specified that all the elements on service quality have
a substantially positive effect on customer satisfaction even though not all the elements give an equal impact
on it (Tan & Maran, 2014).

Apart from that, the regression analysis has revealed that among the other service-quality determinants,
responsiveness greatly influences customer satisfaction. Usually, customers prefer a welcoming atmosphere
in which service providers are keen to assist their customers during the service process. In the interim,
readiness to help customers is expected to develop positive satisfaction of customers. Furthermore, paying
attention to the other elements of service quality, for instance, reliability, assurance, and empathy, is also
important for the management to consider since the level of customer satisfaction is also contributed by
these factors.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

The aspects of service quality are crucial in today’s competitive market. The ‘wow’ factor that customers
experience is equally imperative to service providers in delivering their superior services. This study has
discovered that all four SERVQUAL dimensions have positive and significant relationship with customer
satisfaction. This has suggested that service quality leads to customer satisfaction. The most influential
factor of service quality is responsiveness. This finding is also supported by previous scholars, as well as
other researches literature, on service quality. It can be recommended that the management of service
providers should improve their promised effective services. Emphasis needs to be given to a timely manner
service to customers. Meanwhile, the rapid of exchange and performance is the greatest thing impacting
customer satisfaction (Janahi & Almubarak, 2017). Since the most significant factor contributing to
customer satisfaction is responsiveness, any actions concentrating on refining staff’s problem-solving skills
should be taken into consideration by the management team in order to build customers’ trust while
delivering prompt services without problems and mistakes. Anticipating customers’ needs, understanding,
and listening to them will lead to their satisfaction.

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