Unit I Research Proposal Topic

Introduction: Service sector in today’s business accounts for more than 50% of any country’s GDP. The effect that the service sector accounts for a major chunk of the GDP requires that this sector be evaluated on certain very important tangibles. Services or the tertiary sector as it is called covers a wide gamut of activities like trading, banking & finance, I infotainment, real estate, transportation, security, technical and management consultancy among several others. With the phenomenal growth of the service sector in the last few decades, research related to the creation and delivery of services has been intensified. Four well documented characteristics of services, intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability pose challenges to the marketers to develop appropriate strategies to meet consumer service need profitably. (Parasuraman , zeithmal and Berry , 1985,1988,1991) The researchers were keen in developing models to identify the attributes and understand quality dimensions of services across varied sectors settings and their applicability in service industry to facilitate the service marketers in their efforts of service excellence development. The series of works carried out by Parasuraman, Zeithmal and Berry are considered to be seminal contributions to service quality literatureA. conceptualized service quality as