Service Quality Perceptions of Students at a South African University

Universities all over the world are realigning themselves with service quality and customer orientated practices. To increase student intake universities are now using their excellence in service quality as a competitive advantage to increase their share of local and international student segments. To improve service quality within a university and create a competitive advantage universities have to be more market driven. Universities have to tailor their service offerings to cater to student needs. Understanding student needs is not easy. Understanding specifically student perceptions of a university’s’ service quality is also very complex. The complexity lies in students having very different insights into how they view a service offering within a university. Therefore, the importance of quality surveys being conducted on students is very crucial. These surveys can shed more light on what makes students dissatisfied with a university’s service offerings. Secondly, these surveys can indicate student service quality gaps in tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance or empathy in student encounters with the service delivery process. This study was conducted at a top-ranking South African university and investigated students’ perceptions of service quality. The results of the empirical survey indicated that students were dissatisfied with the university’s’ service offerings. In this paper the researcher comments on quality gaps that students identified in the service delivery process. Recommendations to close these quality gaps and improve service quality within the university are also outlined and highlighted. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p19