What Happens When Students Become Customers?

What Happens When Students Become Customers?

Dr. George Monray on what 622 international students revealed about the gap between expectations and reality

By EJM at DOAJ

In higher education, universities traditionally measure students through grades, retention and graduation rates. But there is another question that increasingly matters to institutions competing in an international education market:

What do students actually think about the service they receive?

In 2014, Dr. George Monray approached that question using a methodology more commonly associated with commercial services than universities.

His study, Service Quality Measurement Using SERVQUAL: An Applied Comparative Study on Customer Perceptions and Expectations under an International Approach, published in the Expert Journal of Marketing, examined the service experience of study-abroad students at a public university in Barcelona.

The research analyzed 622 questionnaires and compared expectations and perceptions across students from the United States, Germany, Belgium, South Korea and China.

The results suggested that the university was not fully meeting student expectations across any of the five SERVQUAL dimensions examined.

The largest gap concerned tangible aspects of the service, including facilities and physical resources, while reliability was another significant area for improvement. By contrast, empathy came close to meeting expectations.

More than a decade later, Monray argues that the central management lesson remains relevant.

Q: Why did you decide to study service quality in a university?

Monray: Because universities are organizations that provide services, but we sometimes forget that. A university may think primarily about academic content, curricula and faculty. Those are obviously fundamental. But from the student's perspective, the experience is much broader. It includes administrative processes, communication, facilities, responsiveness, reliability and the way students are treated. I wanted to examine whether we could apply a well-established service-quality methodology to an international education environment.

Q: Why SERVQUAL?

Monray: SERVQUAL provides a useful conceptual distinction between expectations and perceptions. That is extremely important. Satisfaction is not simply determined by whether the service is objectively good or bad. It is also influenced by what the customer expected before receiving it. If a student expects something at level five and perceives the experience at level three, there is a significant gap. The same experience could be perceived differently by someone whose expectations were lower.

Q: You collected 622 questionnaires. What did the data tell you?

Monray: The overall result was quite revealing. There was a negative gap across all five dimensions of service quality. In other words, perceptions were generally below expectations. But the size of the gap varied considerably. The largest gap was in the tangible dimension, which includes physical facilities and resources. The gap there was approximately -1.10 points. Reliability was another area requiring attention. The interesting point is that the institution did not necessarily have a problem with everything. The gap in responsiveness and assurance was relatively small, and empathy was particularly close to expectations. That distinction is important for management because it tells you where resources may need to be concentrated.

Q: One particularly interesting aspect is that you compared different nationalities. Why?

Monray: Because an international student population is not homogeneous. Students arrive with different cultural backgrounds, previous educational experiences and expectations. If you calculate only an overall average, you may hide important differences between groups. The study therefore looked at profiles associated with five nationalities. For example, the results showed differences in expectations among the groups, with Chinese students recording the highest expectation level in the relevant analysis and South Korean students the lowest. That does not mean that nationality determines satisfaction. It means that international institutions should be careful about assuming that every student enters the university with the same expectations.

Q: Does this have implications for today's international universities?

Monray: Definitely. International education has become increasingly competitive. Universities are not competing only through academic rankings. They are competing through the total student experience. An international student may compare institutions in different countries. That means the university has to understand the complete service journey—from the moment the student applies until the moment the student returns home.

Q: Is there a danger in treating students simply as customers?

Monray: Yes, and that distinction is important. Students are not merely customers buying a conventional commercial service. Education has a transformational and academic dimension that makes it different. But recognizing that students have expectations about the service experience does not reduce education to a commercial transaction. It simply recognizes an organizational reality. If students cannot obtain information, if administrative processes are unreliable, or if facilities do not meet reasonable expectations, those issues can affect their perception of the educational experience.

Q: Your research was published in 2014. Looking back, what would you do differently today?

Monray: Technology gives us possibilities that were much more limited at the time. Today we could collect data longitudinally and examine the student journey before, during and after the international experience. We could also combine satisfaction measures with learning and competency measures. That would create a much more complete picture. You could ask not only, "Were you satisfied?" You could also ask, "What did you expect?", "What did you experience?", and ultimately, "What changed in you as a result of the experience?"

Q: That sounds like a different approach to measuring study abroad altogether.

Monray: Exactly. Satisfaction is important, but it is only one dimension. A student can be satisfied with a program without necessarily developing the competencies that the university intended to develop. Conversely, an academically valuable experience may include challenges that temporarily reduce satisfaction. The next generation of international education assessment should therefore distinguish between service quality, satisfaction and learning outcomes. They are related, but they are not the same thing.

Q: If you had to summarize the main lesson of your research in one sentence, what would it be?

Monray: I would say: You cannot improve an international education experience effectively unless you know the difference between what students expected and what they actually experienced. And once you know that difference, the next question is what you are going to do about it.

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The research behind the interview

Mongay, J. (2014), Service Quality Measurement Using SERVQUAL. An Applied Comparative Study on Customer Perceptions and Expectations under an International Approach, Expert Journal of Marketing, 2(2), 82–85. The article was published December 31, 2014, and is indexed in RePEc/EconPapers and other academic databases.

The research used 622 respondents and examined five SERVQUAL dimensions: Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy.