Service quality attributes affecting passengers’ satisfaction with HIGER city bus

Abstract

Service quality and customer satisfaction are the growing concerns for business organizations throughout the world, and customer satisfaction studies have been proven to be essential tools in trying to optimize services provided to users. For transit agencies, as in other service industries, increase in customer satisfaction translates into retained markets, increased use of the system, newly attracted customers, and a more positive public image. To accomplish these ends, public transport needs reliable and efficient methods of identifying the determinants of service quality from the customers’ perspective. The study is an attempt to identify the factors determining quality in city bus transit, by using a modified SERVPERF approach, and examines passengers’ overall satisfaction with HIGER city bus services. Therefore, a model depicting overall service quality was developed and tested empirically among the bus passengers. Factor and reliability (Cronbach Alpha coefficients) analyses were carried out to determine the validity and unidimensionality of the construct. Furthermore, associations between the passengers’ satisfaction and service quality attributes were explored, and found to be statistically significant. While the dimension of ‘reliability and complaint handling’ emerged as the largest contributor in estimating overall service quality, overall satisfaction was contributed significantly by overall service quality.

Keywords: Service Quality, SERVPERF, Customer Satisfaction, HIGER Bus Service, Ethiopia.