Cross-Domain Evaluation of Service Quality in Producer Services Based on SERVQUAL

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_39How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Producer services; Service quality; SERVQUAL; Firm size; Evaluation subject

Abstract

Producer services are a critical link that supports the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing and the efficient operation of regional economies. However, existing research rarely adopts standardized measurement tools to systematically compare service quality across different subsectors of producer services. Based on the SERVQUAL scale, this paper evaluates service quality across five representative producer service domains—energy conservation and environmental services, information services, financial services, freight transport services, and warehousing and postal express services—from five dimensions (tangibility, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy). Furthermore, it analyzes the influence of firm size and evaluation subject on service quality perception. The findings are as follows: (1) Among these five domains, energy conservation and environmental services exhibit the highest service quality, while information services rank the lowest; financial services, warehousing/express services, and freight transport services fall in a middle range. (2) The five dimensions are generally balanced, with tangibility scoring the highest and reliability the lowest, which indicates that hardware and customer care perform relatively well, whereas service fulfillment stability needs improvement. (3) The service quality index exhibits a gradient pattern where “larger firm size is associated with higher quality”, yet the information services domain shows the largest size gap; in energy conservation and environmental services, medium-sized firms outperform large ones; and in warehousing/express services, small and micro firms slightly surpass medium-sized ones. (4) The ratings from three evaluation subjects follow a consistent gradient: management gives the highest, ordinary employees the middle, and chief quality officers the lowest; the largest divergence across subjects appears in the warehousing/express domain. This study shows that the overall service quality of producer services is good, but information services and the reliability dimension are prominent weaknesses. Enterprises should value the feedback from chief quality officers and frontline employees to prevent management over‑optimism from masking actual service deficiencies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xueyan Su
AU  - Qi Duan
AU  - Jingyue Huang
AU  - Chuheng Cheng
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/30
TI  - Cross-Domain Evaluation of Service Quality in Producer Services Based on SERVQUAL
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 8th International Conference on Economic Management and Cultural Industry (ICEMCI 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 365
EP  - 374
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_39
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-777-4_39
ID  - Su2026
ER  -