Improvement of Service Quality of Taiwan Herb Garden by Six Sigma Concept
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Chen, Hsi-Chin
Abstract
The flourishing development of the service industry makes GDP over 73% in recent years. About 58% of the employment population serve this industry. The leisure service industry, in particular grows by multiple revealing its significant importance. As there is a feature of high homogeneity and substitution in the same trade, the core issue lies on enhancement of service quality in an environment of keen competition. As a result, six sigma (6σ) is applied in this research to improve service quality and increase competitiveness of the leisure industry. First, the service quality model proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (PZB model for short) is utilized to design the items in the service quality questionnaire. Importance and satisfaction of each service item perceived by customers are based for the scale, whose means are further converted to indexes. Thus, a scale-based service performance evaluation matrix with indices of importance as the Y-axis and those of satisfaction as the X-axis is defined. Then, service factors of high importance and low satisfaction are located and defined for improvement in accordance with the index location of each service factor. A measurement model based on the difference between customers’ importance and satisfaction is proposed and a measurement index is defined for an objective evaluation method and procedures. Next, factors of customer dissatisfaction are analyzed and improvement methods are devised. Finally, herb garden service quality is monitored by the performance control model. his paper is a case study on a herb garden A, located at so called Herb Township（Shinshou Township） in Taichung County. Comparisons were made with the other two herb gardens B and C, their locations are close to A, to identify crucial problems clearly and positively expressed by customer. For the survey, a total of 330 copies of questionnaire were issued where 289 were effective copies; 96 were from A, 93 from B and 100 from C, respectively. Survey was made from 2007/7/1 to 2007/7/22. he questionnaires were compared using the performance evaluation matrix and the distance far away from the expected results. The 16th service item： the detailed explanations of the herb characteristic, culture, function and application , was identified to be the crucial problems of herb garden A . It is necessary to be improved first . The cause and effect diagram presented is used to analyze major factors of customer dissatisfaction and improvement strategies are devised by the correlation coefficient matrix.fter the improvement strategy, the herb garden A is requested to carry out the crucial strategy to give the detail explanations on improvements on herb characteristic, culture, function and application. For this research, questionnaires were issued once on 2007/11/24 with 49 effective returns. The calculated K value after improvement is shown to drop from 2.092 to 1.051. This value is found to be in the acceptance area. After implementing the related improvement strategies and with a low K value, customer importance and customer satisfactions are increasingly closer. So after finding an abnormal product service and changes made in an ideal range, the herb garden A can then follow the standardized procedure and knowledge management to implement which can ensure effective control.fter these analysis and research, the standard performance evaluation was developed suitable for the herb garden service industry which can be used to maintain and control service quality. This will increase competitiveness in face of fierce competitions in the near future. At the same time, the improvements also made the herb gardener to achieve and to match standardized procedures used in horticultures for successful management.
Subjects
herb
herb garden
service quality
six sigma
evaluation
Type
thesis
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