Title: Assessing pet industry in Korea using service quality improvement gap model

Authors: Hae-Geun Song; Sung-Uk Lim

Addresses: College of Business Administration, Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea ' Department of Industrial & Management Engineering, Daejin University, Pocheon, Korea

Abstract: Pet industry is anticipated to be growing at a high speed and relative pet policies will be in place soon as the Korean population is ageing. However, there has been no scientific approach to assess the pet industry and to improve it. For this, the authors propose a Service Quality Improvement (SQI) gap model with the improvement of quality attributes as a priority, which takes into consideration the two gaps between the satisfaction levels of employees and customers and between those of the own company and the competitors. The current study empirically analyses Korea's leading animal hospital and derives seven service quality attributes for the hospital. This paper surveys 56 regular customers and 36 internal employees. The results show that service quality attributes can be prioritised for improvement by using the proposed model. A validity test is conducted and suggestions for successful pet industry in Korea are also presented in this paper.

Keywords: pet industry; SERVQUAL; SERVPERF; service profit chain; employee satisfaction; SQI gap model; service quality improvement; service quality attributes; improvement priority; gap analysis; South Korea; animal hospitals; ageing population.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTPM.2015.067791

International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 2015 Vol.15 No.1, pp.2 - 20

Received: 11 Mar 2014
Accepted: 17 Apr 2014

Published online: 05 Mar 2015 *

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