Measuring Quality of Service in Retail Outlets Using Fuzzy Numbers

Abstract

The measurement of quality of service in any service providing organisation has been a very complex process to deal with. Most of the attributes here are intangible; largely depend upon customers’ expectations and perceptions. The quality of service may be poor, average, good, and so on depending upon the performance of the service provider. The linguistic terms like poor, average and good could be vague (fuzzy) unless various attributes of a particular service are understood precisely. In order to avoid the ambiguity of the concept associated with customers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality fuzzy numbers are widely used in many complex management issues. In this paper we focus on quantifying the quality of service in retail outlets based on some specific characteristics using fuzzy numbers. Key words: Quality of service; Retail outlets; linguistic terms; fuzzy numbers