Service quality of the public transportation (short-distance private bus service) and customer Satisfaction in Matara district in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Customer value and satisfaction are the heart of thinking and practice in Marketing. Every marketer who wishes to deliver his products to the target customers should deliver the customers' expected value and satisfaction in long run. If the customer perceives a greater value of the product, he might probably purchase and use that product. In the case of that, the services industry is highly important since most of the services are much familiar and popularized today and play a key role in satisfying customer needs and wants. Further, when paying attention on the characteristics of services such as intangibility, inseparability, perishablity and variability, it shows that the service providers and their work force have to play a key role in delivering the services with better quality as customer expected. Among the number of services delivered in Sri Lanka, the public transportation takes place the top, since customers consume a great deal of services daily when they are going to engage in their day today activities. In that case, it is sensible to verify the service quality in the public transportation in Sri Lanka, since more than 90% of people in the country use public transportation for their daily traveling in all directions to accomplish their daily activities for different purposes. In Sri Lanka, the practice of the concepts of customer value and satisfaction stands in a very low condition. Most of the time, the private bus service providers have been unable to satisfy people's needs and wants in the country, not matched·rwith people's expectations and most of the time passengers are frustrated with poor quality, overcharging and sometimes even ill-behavior of the conductor and the driver. In that context, it is a significant factor to verify whether public transportation service (short distance-private bus service) providers have paid a greater interest towards their passengers' needs and wants. Accordingly, this study was focused to verify whether the private sector transportation service delivers a satisfactory service for their passengers. Hence, the main objective of the study was to measure the service quality of the short-distance private bus transportation service in terms of customer satisfaction. To conduct the study, the survey method was used as the main research approach and mail questionnaire was used to contact people in collecting data. The population of the study represents the passengers benefited the above service in Sri Lanka. The sampling was included 200 people randomly selected from Matara district. To measure quality of the service, variables were used as noises inside the bus, politeness of the conductors, speed, security, the number of passengers loaded, competition among the buses, facilities inside the bus, cleanliness, and ticket issuing. Based on the above variables, the overall quality in terms of customer satisfaction was evaluated. Finally, it was found that the overall quality of this short distance private transportation service is very poor; hence, the customer satisfaction is not upto the expected level.