SERVICE QUALITY AND ITS EFFECT ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

Abstract

Service quality has established a pivotal role in achieving patient satisfaction in healthcare industry. It is well known fact that achieving and maintaining patient satisfaction is important to retain their faith and loyalty towards the organization.
With the changing healthcare scenario, the prime focus has slightly shifted from only treatment to value added treatment. This value is added by the supplementary services and facilities provided by the hospital. All healthcare institutes have started putting more and more efforts towards giving these additional value added services to the patients. These may be in form of monetary and non monetary facilities. The current study focuses on the various dimensions of service quality and also attempts to find the gap between perceived and expected level of services quality.

The result achieved at the end of the study also help in identifying the role of most prominent and least important parameters. Various studies have been done in the past where attempts have been made to identify various dimensions of service quality also known as SERVQUAL. These dimensions may slightly vary from industry to industry.