Validating INDSERV (Industrial Service Quality) Scale in Business to Business Context: A Study Based on the Sri Lankan Hotel Sector

Abstract

Service quality is generally measured on the SERVQUAL scale, developed by Parasuraman, Berry & Zeithaml (1985). However, the appropriateness of SERVQUAL is disputed as it is specifically designed for the B2C (business-to customer) context (Gounaris 2005a, 2005b, Lee 2011). Thus, Gounaris (2005a, 2005b) developed an instrument called INDSERV that specifically measures business-to-business (B2B) service quality performance. The purpose of this study is to validate the INDSERV scale in Sri Lanka as well. Cross-sectional data of service quality in the outsourcing context was collected through a survey of managers in the hotel sector in Sri Lanka using self-administered structured questionnaires. A total of 183 usable responses were collected. Unidimensionality, reliability and validity of the scale were assessed accordingly. Among the four dimensions of the scale, Hard Process Quality shows the highest contribution on the vendors’ service quality performance (β= 0.98) followed by Output Quality (β= 0.86). Statistical tests were proposed to exclude the ‘potential service quality’ dimension from the scale as it reported weak reliability (α = 0.25, all item total correlations were below 0.1). There were 22 items in the INDSERV scale and the refined model contains only 12 items. In conclusion, this study identified the need for a field survey to uncover unique factors that measure industrial service quality in Sri Lanka as it may be a reason for the contextual mismatch of a borrowed scale.