Closing Service Quality Gaps Using Dynamic Service Level Agreements

Abstract

Each service interaction between a provider and a customer is an opportunity for the provider to delight, satisfy or disappoint the customer. However, the customers' expectations may change on every interaction. Therefore, defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) at design time and then restricting the customers' options limits the possibilities for the customers to express their expectations. This is one of the reasons why the services quality is suffering from gaps identified more than two decades ago. In this paper, the authors propose a service quality approach such that SLAs can be specified at execution time (dynamic service levels) in contrast to the usual static SLAs specified at design time. They evaluated the proposal's impact in the service quality gaps using SERVQUAL. The proposal showed improvements in three of the five dimensions measured by SERVQUAL.