For many years, research in the area of service quality was dominated by issues of definition
and measurement. In the mid 1990’s this began to change as researchers came to focus more
attention on defining and measuring the outcomes of service quality. Implicitly, if not
explicitly, this stream of research has been attempting empirically to evaluate whether drives
to improve service quality would (as claimed) generate any real benefits (in terms of business
performance, customer loyalty etc). Evidence to date has been varied although the dominant
findings would suggest a positive (if complex) relationship between service quality and
business performance. The intermediate role played by customer attitudes and behaviour has
been an increasing focus for attention, particularly so with ‘defensive’ marketing and
customer retention high on the agenda for many service organisations.
Although some of the research on service quality and its implications has taken place in a
public sector context, the majority has focused attention on private sector organisations, not
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least because service quality programmes are generally more developed and performance
outcomes are easier to measure. However given the managerial and financial context in
which the public sector now operates, the case for such research has become increasingly
compelling. The current paper reports on the findings of a project with a public sector focus.
Higher Education (HE) was taken as the research setting and the objectives of the study were
to examine the impacts of service quality on one particular outcome measure, namely,
willingness to recommend which was seen as most relevant to the context. Positive word-ofmouth
has been shown to be one of the most important factors in attracting international
students to higher education (Allen and Higgins, 1994) as well as being generally considered
to be an important outcome in any service context. Moreover, because HE is for most
consumers a one-off purchase, behavioural outcomes like repeat purchased are largely
inapplicable.
The paper proceeds with a brief literature review to provide the relevant background and then
goes on to discuss the rationale for the focus on HE. Subsequent sections examine
methodological issues, the results of some in depth interviews and the findings from a large
scale survey of international students. Conclusions and implications are presented in the final
section of the paper.