Investigating customer expectation and customer satisfaction in a services department of the NWU using selected operations management principles

Abstract

This study investigates service delivery in the Higher Degree Administration (HDA) office of the North-West University (NWU). For this study, the relationship between customer expectation and customer satisfaction is the main topic studied within the boundaries of the discipline of operations management (OM) and a selection of its ten elements. The point of departure is that OM theory proposes that the use of OM principles improves the operations of any organisation. The operations in this study comprise service delivery to internal and external customers of the NWU. The interaction under investigation is the interaction between the HDA office and its customers. The customer pool includes students, staff, and external persons with an interest in the services offered by the NWU through the HDA office. The elements of OM that were selected for this study are quality and process design. These two elements have a direct application in a service setting. Quality as an OM element provides tools to monitor service operations as well as tools to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction. Customer opinions (also called the voice of the customer) regarding customer satisfaction and improvement recommendations were collected via surveys. For the study to investigate customer satisfaction, the 5 SERVQUAL elements, namely reliability, assurance, tangibility, empathy, and responsiveness were used to analyse the secondary data. For the study to provide suggestions for improving HDA service delivery, process design (an element of OM) was used. The perceived long-term effect that customer satisfaction has on an operation includes improved profit for the organisation and customer loyalty. The goal of this study is to enable the HDA office to render services that could be labelled as having ‘service excellence’, and for it to be the standard.