Effects of Service Quality on Customer Satisfaction in Rail Transportation System in Sri Lanka
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Date
2013
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Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
In today's competitive market scenario, organizations have well understood the importance of
building and managing the relationship effectively with its customers. For building and
maintaining a healthy relationship with the customer, organizations need to understand and meet
the expectations of their customer. Further, in the business world satisfaction plays major role.
Satisfaction from service quality is usually evaluated in terms of technical quality and functional
quality (Gronroos, 1984). Usually, customers do not have much information about the technical
aspects of a service; therefore, functional quality becomes the major factor from which to form
perceptions of service quality (Donabedian, 1980, 1982). Service quality may be defined as
customer perception of how well a service meets or exceeds their expectations (Czepiel, 1990).
Sri Lanka is one of the most wonderful tourist destinations in the world and after the civil war
tourism has become a fast emerging sector in the Sri Lankan economy. Thus, the development
of the tourism industry directly influences the economic development of the country. In 2010
immediately after the end of the war, Sri Lanka had a growth of 46% in tourist
arrivals.Moreover, transportation is the key player of the tourism industry. In this context the
current study investigated the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction and
identified the existing situation of service quality factors on customer satisfaction of railway
transportation in Sri Lanka.
The sample of the research is 60 foreign tourists who traveled via Colombo-Badulla rail track in
Expo rail and Rajadani Express coaches. Further, they are the recently launched coaches which
introduced the public, private partnership to the Sri Lankan rail way system. In addition, the
sample was selected by employing the convenience sampling technique. Questionnaire based
direct interview method was used to collect data from the selected sample. 30 questions were
prepared on the basis of service quality factors and tourist satisfaction and 03 questions were
prepared on the basis of tourists demographic factors. Descriptive statistical techniques were
used to discover and summarize the attributes of the sample. Furthermore, correlation
coefficient analysis was used to measure the degree of linear association between two variables.
Multiple regressions analysis was also used to combine the contribution of each part of the
independent variable.
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Keywords
Management, Entrepreneurship and management, Customer Satisfaction, Transportation System, Business Management