Relationship Between Service Quality Management Practices and Operational Performance of Shipping Firms in Kenya

Abstract

The need for firms to offer quality provision that meet consumer expectations for sustainable operations and maintain competitiveness in business has been the main focus of many firms in different sectors especially in the service industry. The Shipping industry has not been left behind and firms have had to change with the times and ensure their consumers get superior and quality services thus they have embraced service quality management. Service quality management practices has proven ability to improve operational performance of firms. To affirm the argument the researcher sought to find out the extent the shipping firms had adopted the service quality management in Kenya, secondly, connection among service quality management practices and operational performance of shipping firms in Kenya. And the challenges faced by the firms when implementing service quality management. The research design used a descriptive survey and collected data from all the registered shipping firms in Kenya. The tool for collecting data was a structured questionnaire which was controlled by focused questions organized to give responses on a likert scale. Data collected from the repondents was evaluated through use of descriptive statistics and regression analysis technique; the findings were presented in tables. The findings revealed that shipping firms embraced a number of service quality management practices to a large extent the metrics scoring more than 4 as their means. The results also showed that the companies were met by several challenges in their endeavor to instrument the service quality management among the top challenge was lack of resources and top management support. The main conclusion was that the adoption of service quality management practices by shipping firms was inevitable since it improved the operational performance of these firms. The study found out that the highest metric of service quality contributing to improved operational performance was management commitment and support, followed by employee participation and customer focus the least metric was supplier quality management and employee resource development. The researcher recommends that companies should adopt service quality management in order to improve their operational performance of firms. The firms should be proactive and get the necessary resources for implementation of service quality to be successful. To affirm these conclusions the researcher concludes that similar studies be undertaken to solidify the findings.