Service quality gaps of business customers in the shipping industry

This paper extends the gaps model of [Zeithaml, V.A., Parasuraman, A., Berry, L. 1990. Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectation. The Free Press, New York] from the service provider to the business customer side by examining two service quality (SQ) gaps. One is the SQ gap between types of business customers and the other is the SQ gap among employee statuses of business customers. Besides that, the five-factor SERVQUAL measure as the initial hypothesized model is also tested. The applicability of SERVQUAL to measuring the perceived SQ of customers in the shipping industry of Taiwan is rejected empirically. The existence of the two hypothesized gaps is verified by the method of MANOVA.