Question 1
Dr. Kristin Wright’s new and improved private dental practice faces her competition from health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which put upper limits on spending to maximize efficiencies and provide the lowest available cost to patients – health insurances cover all costs. Not only is higher quality service important to Wright as a personal value, but it is critical to patient retention; because patients pay extra fees to Wright, her practice’s quality must be substantially better than the HMOs, otherwise the patients will rationally switch to the cheaper service provider (Dr. Wright 1). Subsequently, understanding patient judgments and perception of her service quality is vital to her dental practice’s existence.
As a service provider, the quality of your service “is more difficult to define and measure [than] the quality of tangible goods” (LMH 196). However, research has broken down consumers’ service quality analysis into a combination of five components: responsiveness, empathy, assurance, reliability, and tangibles. (LMH 197). This break-down can help Dr. Wright more accurately determine consumers’ valuation of the practice’s quality.
Responsiveness refers to the “ability to provide prompt service” (LMH 197). At Dr. Wright’s office, the staff is proactive; when they anticipate delay in the schedule, someone calls the patient to warn in advance and minimize inconvenience to the consumer. If, however, there is an unanticipated wait, the patient is only expected to wait a maximum of 20 minutes before given an option to reschedule (Dr. Wright 3). While rescheduling may not be ideal for the consumer, this office policy’s flexibility reflects confidence in their service speed as well as empathy for their waiting patients. A main reason why Dr. Wright built a new office space was to create more room, allowing her staff to work more efficiently (Dr.