Is SERVQUAL Reliable and Valid? A Review from the Perspective of Dimensions in Different Typical Service Industries

SERVQUAL is the best known and most commonly used scale measuring service quality in a wide variety of service environments. But several researchers have identified potential difficulties with the reliability and validity of the scale when it is used in a specific service environment. The purpose of this study is to review the scales measuring service quality in researches, comparing with SERVQUAL from the perspective of research method and dimensionality, and to investigate whether SERVQUAL are still suitable for measuring quality of typical service industries. We chose four well-studied service industries as key domains, and reviewed related researches about developing scales of measuring service quality in those four domains in the past 30 years. The four industries are retail banking, transportation, higher education and online shopping. Results showed that, even though the quality of most typical service industries cannot be completely measured by using SERVQUAL, the dimensionalities of scales in typical industries are associated to SERVQUAL’s five dimensions. SERVQUAL is still valuable for service quality scale development.