Sustaining service excellence in the insurance industry: a Kenyan perspective

Simmy Marwa, G. Rand, K. Keoy, S. Koh

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The quest for service excellence/superiority and the need to realign services to changing consumer needs and tastes in various industries (including insurance) has compelled businesses to assess their service quality more often than they did previously. Business dynamics are ever changing and businesses need to keep pace with the shifts in the market place more so with the prevailing global recession. Sureshchandar et al., (2002) contend that service firms find it difficult to envision and understand what aspects connote high quality to consumers and the levels of those aspects that are required to deliver high quality service. Only when a service provider has some definite knowledge of how its services would be perceived by its customers, that it can direct these assessments in the preferred direction. Service quality is by character, an abstruse concept, which means that ably managing service quality requires a lucid discernment of what precisely service quality means to customers (Rust and Oliver, 1994). Thus Kenya‟s insurers like other businesses ought to understand well what service quality connotes in the industry and provide services which embrace these quality attributes. Insurers must therefore be proactive in collecting, collating and gauging not only their customers‟ expectations against perceptions, but also those of other stakeholders so as to establish the extent to which these expectations are being met by the services they provide. This effectively implies, gauging insurers‟ stand/position on the path to excellence and subsequently instituting corrective realignments to bolster and sustain service quality in the long run).
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)288-301
    Number of pages14
    JournalInternational Journal of Value Chain Management
    Volume3
    Issue number3
    Publication statusPublished - 2009

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