ASSESMENT OF SERVICE QUALITY AND CUSTOMERS’SATISFACTIONS (THE CASE OF PRIVATE HOSPITALS IN ADDIS ABABA)

Abstract

Today, the modern age can be called as the "Age of Consumers". As in the present business scenario of intense competition, customer satisfaction has become the prime concern of each and every kind of industry. High level of customer satisfaction is very important in order to win customers and surge ahead of competitors. In order to assess the quality and effectiveness of services provided by the private hospitals in Addis Ababa, a cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted among the out-patients to find out the patients' expectations and perceptions of the hospital services of the doctors, nurses/ medical assistant, administration and infrastructures with a general objective of the assessment of service quality and customers’ satisfaction of private Hospitals in Addis Ababa.Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire distributed to out-patients in the three private hospitals. There were a total of 386 out-patients respondents involved in this research. To analyses the collected data, SPSS version 20 for windows used. From the result findings, there was a significantly difference between expectations and perceptions for all the five dimensions in hospital services quality. The highest difference between expectations and perceptions was found in the urgency dimension specifically in patients room comfort ability and the lowest difference was in tangibility domain specifically doctor's/Nurses service quality. This study demonstrated that patients' expectations were higher than their perceptions in the five out of five dimensions in the hospital services quality. The Logistic regression showed that Tangibility, Reliability and Assuranceare the domains that have significant relation with satisfaction. Majority of patients in this study responded that they are satisfied with the service they were provided.