Evolution of service quality and some implications on computer science research

Abstract

Service quality discussions in literature can be traced back to mid-20 th century and have evolved from being service specific quality discussions to generic models of service quality to more advanced mathematical and statistical models. a bulk of this evolution has happened in the traditional business marketing world. With emergence of IT services, there is an increased interest to investigate the science behind these concepts. The paper is aimed to compress the evolution of these concepts into one article as a starting point for researchers from different domains to get a wider perspective on the area. in particular the review tries to highlight the challenges and problems in the existing approaches which can be potentially solved by advances in computer science. The connections have not been highlighted in the past since most known literature in service quality continues to point back to the traditional marketing world, giving primarily a marketing view. The intention is to facilitate engineers and computer science professionals to appreciate the marketing aspects of service quality, with an additional context from the IT domain, so as to fuel the research towards solving the problems in this area at the intersection of marketing, economics and science. © 2011 IEEE.