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.