Evaluating the quality of sea-freight services in a forwarding firm : Case study: Blue Water Shipping, Finland
Nguyen, Phuong (2018)
Nguyen, Phuong
Yrkeshögskolan Arcada
2018
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201805229636
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201805229636
Tiivistelmä
The fluctuation in Finland’s foreign trade situation as the consequence of the 2008 financial crisis has created many difficulties for the local freight-forwarders in maintaining their customer loyalty. Constantly evaluating and improving the service quality to fulfill the customer satisfaction can be seen as a smart strategy for these companies to gain sustainable competitive advantages.
Service quality, in fact is not easy to evaluate because its characteristics are very special compared with the physical products. Among many proposed methods, the gaps model has been popularly used in the service quality assessment due to its trustworthiness and accuracy. SERVQUAL is a specific instrument developed from the gap model, provides an exhaustive framework to analyse services on five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy (Zeithaml et al., 1990).
The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the quality of sea freight services provided by Blue Water Shipping in Finland by finding out whether BWS’s current services result in customer satisfaction or not. The evaluation is conducted by using the SERVQUAL model as the guideline for generating the interview questions. The author approached this thesis topic in form of a case study, structured in a deductive frame together with a usage of both quantitative and qualitative data. Primary data was taken from semi-structured, in depth interviews and email surveys, which targeted to only Finnish clients of the case company. There were six companies participated in the research.
The result shows that BWS’s customers were relatively content with the services they had been provided. However, the quality of BWS’s sea-freight services had not received a complete satisfaction from the customers so instant improvements were strongly required. Based on this result, the author was able to provide relevant suggestions for the company’s future enhancement. Furthermore, this research could be considered as new way of applying the simplified SERVQUAL version with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate the service quality.
Service quality, in fact is not easy to evaluate because its characteristics are very special compared with the physical products. Among many proposed methods, the gaps model has been popularly used in the service quality assessment due to its trustworthiness and accuracy. SERVQUAL is a specific instrument developed from the gap model, provides an exhaustive framework to analyse services on five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy (Zeithaml et al., 1990).
The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the quality of sea freight services provided by Blue Water Shipping in Finland by finding out whether BWS’s current services result in customer satisfaction or not. The evaluation is conducted by using the SERVQUAL model as the guideline for generating the interview questions. The author approached this thesis topic in form of a case study, structured in a deductive frame together with a usage of both quantitative and qualitative data. Primary data was taken from semi-structured, in depth interviews and email surveys, which targeted to only Finnish clients of the case company. There were six companies participated in the research.
The result shows that BWS’s customers were relatively content with the services they had been provided. However, the quality of BWS’s sea-freight services had not received a complete satisfaction from the customers so instant improvements were strongly required. Based on this result, the author was able to provide relevant suggestions for the company’s future enhancement. Furthermore, this research could be considered as new way of applying the simplified SERVQUAL version with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate the service quality.