SERVICE QUALITY AND PASSENGER SATISFACTION THE CASE OF LIGHT RAIL TRANSPORT IN ADDIS ABABA

Abstract

In any business–to-customer (B2C) type of environment, satisfying a customer is the ultimate goal and objective. This is perhaps due to the fact that managers sometimes do not really understand of what actually goes on in a customer’s mind. As such, this predicament has provided as a challenging task to most business conglomerates that places strong emphasis on customer satisfaction. The general objective of this study is to determine the relationship between service quality and passengers satisfaction and also to investigate passenger’s expectation and perception about ERC service quality. It is also clear from this research that passenger’s service has impact on service quality perception and passenger’s satisfaction. In this research, the SERVQUAL instrument developed by Parasuraman (1985) has been applied in designing the questionnaire by using five dimensions of service quality: tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Questionnaires are distributed to 392 passengers and 364 questionnaire returned. The questionnaire aimed to determine the level of passengers’ expectation and perception towards the service quality of the LRT. The results revealed that the responsiveness and tangibility dimensions raised the highest level of expectation, whereas the responsiveness, tangibility, and reliability dimensions fulfilled the highest level of perception. The study also investigates the dimensions and their levels of service quality that have significant effect on passenger’s satisfaction in LRT. The findings showed that the dimensions of service quality such as tangible, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy are positively correlated to passenger’s satisfaction. Data collected from respondents are analyzed by using qualitative analysis, descriptive, correlation, and regression analysis.