ABSTRACT
As the world economy continues to grow, the proportions and interrelations among its basic sectors – agriculture, industry and services – are also changing. The service sector has grown in importance in the world economy and has outweighed the agriculture and industry sectors in middle-income and high-income countries. The unique features of service make it difficult to define service quality. The unique features of service also determine that we cannot measure service quality as we measure product quality. The Expectancy-Disconfirmation Model has been widely used to explain customer satisfaction. Following the Expectancy-Disconfirmation approach, an approach was developed to investigate confirmation or disconfirmation of expectations. This approach subtracts the score difference between expectations and evaluations of each aspect of service performance to reach confirmation or disconfirmation. Importance performance analysis (IPA) is a simple and effective technique to measure service quality, which was first introduced by Martilla and James.
