Sustainable Service Quality of Water and Sewerage Companies

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to critically review and discuss the perceived service quality of the water and sewerage services with the addition of sustainability factor with respect to economic, environmental and social aspects among the Malaysian water and sewerage companies. Methodology: The review of various service quality models and sustainability models that has led to our findings on knowledge gap between sustainability and service quality especially in utility services sector (water and energy). Results: The authors propose a modified SERVQUAL model with six independent variables namely tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy with an additional dimension i.e. sustainability. Addition of sustainability has modified the existing SERVQUAL instrument to be called sustainable service quality or SUSSERV. Implication: The paper involves discovering the lack of research in sustainability service quality particularly in the context of Malaysian water services (including sewerage). This review should be able to answer the question why SERVQUAL is not appropriate for measuring water services quality thus requiring some improvement or modification using SUSSERV. Previous efforts and focus have been made based on water quality and water treatment or process quality (technical issues), thus this paper is an attempt to fill the gap between service, product and process quality by adding sustainability dimension in service quality evaluation.