ASSESSMENT OF SERVICE QUALITY AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION :THE CASE OF THREE SELECTED PRIVATE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN ADDIS ABABA

Abstract

Service quality and user satisfaction are often treated together as functions of user’s perceptions and expectations. To encompass various aspects of service quality SERVQUAL model has been adopted in this study. The objective of this study was to measure the service quality of three Primary Schools at Yeka Sub City from the parent’s perspectives and discuss the overall schools performance towards meeting user’s expectations. Both primary and secondary data were collected; the instrument for primary data collection was modified SERVQUAL questionnaire. The respondent of the questionnaire were student parents who are the main customers of the teaching service of primary schools. The selections of the respondents were carried out by using simple random sampling research technique. A set of questionnaire were prepared and given to 118 student parents. Then these collected data were sorted and registered in SPSS version 20 statistical software to analyzing the data. After analyzing the data the study provides results. The study has two variables dependent and independent. In dependent variable there is the customer satisfaction while in independent variable there are service quality dimensions. The Pearson correlation was applied on data, and results exposed that there is a strong positive and a significant relationship between the variables. The findings of the study revealed that respondents were unsatisfied with the service quality provision by the schools; parents’ expectations were more than their perceptions. The school service provisions do not meet the expectation of its users as gaps were observed negatively almost in all service dimensions. The research showed that the highest gap was occurred in Responsiveness followed by Assurance. The most important dimension identified from parents’ perspective was Assurance, followed by Responsiveness, and Reliability. The study recommends school services in all aspects be improved and user’s expectations have be realized to ensure their customer satisfaction.