• Ei tuloksia

1. INTRODUCTION

1.2 Research gap

Customer is the essential part of any business, more and more research on service marketing to understand customer‟s behaviours and attitudes have been raised in both of the academic and practical fields. At the same time, when globalization along with information communication and technology revolution and the increasing demand for knowledge have emerged vastly, both challenges and opportunities have been created.

As a result, there has been more and more intense competition in today's market. In simple words, it is mandatory to understand what customers expect. Service quality, therefore, becomes popular to be studied to evaluate customer‟s expectation, satisfaction and later retention. One of the most well-known measures of service quality is SERVQUAL developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry in their article named

“SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer‟s perception of service quality” in 1988. So far, this model has been used in various service sectors such as banking and hospitality industry and in different empirical contexts as well as cultural backgrounds. For example, Dr. Ritesh K. Patel (2014) has proved that each determinant of service quality plays a vital role in brand loyalty of customer in the context of Indian banking retail industry. However, this model has not taken culture into consideration as expectations of service quality vary across cultural groups (Olivier; Liu & Sudharshan, 2000). According to Yoo and Donthu (1998), there is a positive correlation of culture and service quality expectations. In another research, Heskett, Sasser and Hart (1990) insist on the importance of psychographics, the way people think, feel and behave, in

expecting service quality. Later, with the fact that service quality plays essential role in understanding customer satisfaction and retention, Furrer, Liu and Sudharshan (2000) tried to figure out the relationship between culture, which is represented by five dimensions by Hofstede and service quality perception. Indeed, culture plays an important role in understanding customers and their expectations all over the world, especially for multinational companies. For example, Mattila (1999) has pointed out that customers with Western cultural background tend to pay bigger attention to tangibles cue in a physical setting rather than Asian customers. In addition, SERVQUAL does not cover all of the services which are much diversed in nature. Most of the current studies using SERVQUAL in evaluating customer‟s quality expectation focus on one service only. There has not been much comparison between two or several service industries.

Besides, service is very complex in nature. It can be explained due to several reasons such as its high volume of interpersonal contact, its involvement of intangibility and so forth. So, Lovelock and Wirtz (2011) has divided them into four types for easier research. Among them, the two types of mental stimulus processing and information processing are the one having highest contact with customers, which lead to the fact that more research should be aimed to them, especially in term of cultural factors. Therefore, the fact that how different types of service are in nature affects the expectation of customers can be of much interest and importance, especially for the type of service that requires considerable human interaction.

Regarding education, people always face choices and find it difficult to make decisions, especially in purchasing products and experiencing services due to their long-term results as well as the fact that the results depend on both the service provider and the customer. As globalization deepens, products, capital, technology and even labour can move freely around the world, this process involves increasing opportunity for young people to get immersed in a global labour market. Simultaneously, there is also chance for for-profit schools to catch up this trend and expand their business. Thanks to the development of technology and freer and freer flows of labour and knowledge, education becomes approachable more than ever. As a result, the idea of “global

university” becomes outstanding. This kind of university is not a part of its local business field or area but a part of the business world where schools compete with each other on a global basis and adjust themselves accordingly. When physical distance does not matter anymore and communication is easier than ever before, students come from any corner in the world.

Similar to education service, the increasing globalization also has enormous impacts on the healthcare service industry. For example, developing countries can attract customers from developed countries by offering high quality health care at a lower cost. Or rich people in developing countries may travel to the countries of high quality in healthcare for better treatment. Together with the free transfusion of knowledge and information, international standards become clearer and achievable in the mindsets of people all over the world, not limited to some citizens of developed countries. Patients, or customers, thus, require different quality from healthcare service providers. Clinics and hospitals now are prepared for higher demands together with higher quality as well as diversified customers with different cultural backgrounds. This situation has brought both opportunities and challenges for health care providers, health care systems, and even policy makers to create and deliver culturally and professionally competent services.

These two industries are very good representatives for service not only because of its extensive influence in human society but also due to the important contribution of culture reflected in these fields‟ practices.

Furthermore, although the study of the relationship between culture and service quality expectation has received more and more attention due to its necessity in real business world with Hofstede cultural dimensions as the main framework for culture, the recently-added dimension of “indulgence” has not been sufficiently studied, leaving a gap in the literature. Therefore, this thesis will integrate the sixth dimension into study in order to offer a more comprehensive approach on culture and service quality expectation, which may contribute to later research.

Last but not least, SERVQUAL is used mainly in quantitative research without much deep and thorough analysis on how and what customer need from the service, which is

of high value for real business managers. Therefore, this thesis would like to contribute in shedding light on how culture impacts customer‟s expectation for service quality between two types of services, which contribute to both the academic field and the real business world.