An application of the servqual model to determine the dimensions that influence customer satisfaction and the level of service quality of restaurants in Maldives / Aminath Hussain

Abstract

The food and Beverage industry is immensely diverse thus individual businesses have specific characteristics, operating standards, customer base, and benchmarks and operating environment. Due the quick delivery of services, low prices and international franchises taking an interest to invest in emerging markets such as Maldives, restaurant operations have gained wide appeal for both operators and consumers. The purpose of the current research is to investigate the influence that service quality has on customer satisfaction among restaurants operated in Maldives. The main focus of the study was to identify the gap between expectation and perception, which would as the result determine the actual level of service quality among the investigated restaurants in this study. The study was conducted among three local restaurants operated in Male', which is the main economic and commercial hub of Maldives. Even though there were difference and similarities between the services offered at each individual restaurant they served the same customer base. The scope of this study is limited to only identifying GAP 5 proposed by Parasuraman et al., (1985), which is the difference between expectation and perception of the customer towards the actual and perceived service quality. The significance of this study is related highlighting that identifying impact of customer satisfaction and the level of service quality is crucial to the management of service quality in a sustainable way, even for service businesses as restaurants. The findings of this study indicated that restaurants operated in Maldives are not able to meet or even exceed the expected service quality level of their customers, thus are not capable of fulfilling customer satisfaction in any of the five dimensions of the SEVQAL model.