Service quality management by expanded traditional importance–performance analysis

Traditionally, importance–performance analysis (IPA) is a simple and effective technique that can assist practitioners in identifying improvement priorities for service attributes. However, many issues still exist and are worthy of discussion. First, traditional IPA emphasizes the external customers’ satisfaction, but ignores internal customers’ (employees) achievement. Second, traditional IPA does not provide any information on comparisons with competitors’ performance. Third, practitioners of traditional IPA usually use the sample mean to rate the importance and performance, leading to a great degree of uncertainty due to sampling errors. Based on these considerations, this study attempts to expand the functions of traditional IPA and proposes an expanded importance–performance analysis (EIPA), which not only involves both the perspectives of internal and external customers in evaluating the importance, but also defines two standardized indictors to measure the internal and external service performance. Moreover, an EIPA matrix is constructed which provides managers with an integrated graphical representation based on symbols and locations of indicators.