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Experiencing Fast-Food Restaurant Service Quality: An In-Depth Analysis On

Customer Reviews.

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International Symposium & Exhibition on Business and Accounting 2016 (ISEBA 2016) ISSN: 978-983-42982-8-9

Experiencing Fast-Food Restaurant Service Quality: An In-Depth

Analysis On Customer Reviews.
Mohd Zulkeflee Bin Abd Razaka*, Azleen Bte Iliasb, Siti Fara Fadila Bte Abd Razakc
a
Marketing & Entrepreneur Development Department, COBA, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Sultan Haji
Ahmad Shah Campus, 26700 Bandar Muadzam, Pahang, Malaysia.
b
Accounting Department, COBA, UNITEN.
c
Finance and Economics Department, COBA, UNITEN.

Keyword ABSTRACT
This study is conducted in order to investigate the degree
Customer Experience of satisfaction level of customers after experiencing
Service Quality McDonald’s services in Malaysia through SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL Dimensions dimensions. It tested also the relevancy of SERVQUAL
Customer Loyalty dimensions with three new additional items (food prices, service
McDonald’s time and convenient location) for importance ranking purposes
Fast-Food Restaurant and examining relationship of each SERVQUAL dimensions
after service patronization. A survey was used to evaluate
customer experience towards services offered by McDonald’s
Malaysia and it consists of Measurement of Experience
Performance to Service Quality. Instrument used in this research
is adapted from Parasuraman et al. (1991) and Lee & Ulgado,
(1997). Results of importance ranking has shown that
Tangibility has become the most important item for McDonald’s
Malaysia to prioritize for their future planning and strategies.
This study is important to the body of knowledge as it will
discover the impact and influence of service quality to customer
satisfaction and customer loyalty framework.

Copyright © 2016 Universiti Tenaga Nasional.

All rights reserved.
*Corresponding Author. Email address: zulkeflee@uniten.edu.my

1. INTRODUCTION
Fast food industry has created a very stiff rivalry among the competitors where customer
retention has become a major indicator to service firm growth and success. Therefore, service
recovery and service improvements are the pivotal to firm success. As for any global fast food brands,
the key to succeed in delivering their core services is to understand and adapting themselves to local
preferences; to the extent of filling the needs (Qin et al., 2010). Due to the differences of needs and
perceptions of every service firm customers, the globalization has forced the fast food industry to
become more sensitive in adapting local preferences particularly when the customers enter the
process of service delivery. This is the “moment of truth” where the customers are ready to
experiencing quality or failure of services. Therefore, it is important to comprehend how customers
assessing services so that the firms can adapt their offerings according to what is required. This will
ensure the superior service quality is undertaken and support the growth and success of the firm. To
focus on the fast food industry, the determination of success to customers’ satisfaction and future
loyalty is through providing them with service quality and meal quality. This confirmed consumer
loyalty is a pre-requisite for a successful and profitable business which has been proven by several
authors that argued on satisfaction as it is an antecedent to loyalty (Woodside et al., 1989; Cronin
and Taylor, 1992; Kandampully and Suhartanto, 2000; Lovelock and Wright, 2002; Hong and Goo,
2004; Ekinci et al., 2008; Faullant et al., 2008).
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 As understood, service quality has both impact to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty; a
direct impact to customer satisfaction and indirect impact to customer loyalty. Though, there are still
many more elements that must be counted in for a better and clear understanding process of satisfying
the customers. In depth understanding of satisfying the customers will lead into essential order to
truly deliver what customers desire based on the individual and specific needs. For this research,
McDonald’s services was chosen to be tested in determining the level of satisfactorily of their
customer after patronization. The customers rated the services based on their individual experience
and this has led to many outcomes that need to be discussed. McDonald’s is a scenario case that
referring to a combination amongst its process of globalization, standardization and adaptation to
local societies (Vignali, 2001).
The scope of study is focusing into McDonalds services in Malaysia. Therefore, this study has
been conducted to investigate the degree of satisfaction level of customers after experiencing
McDonald’s services in Malaysia through SERVQUAL dimensions. This study is also testing the
relevancy of SERVQUAL dimensions with three new additional items to be tested which is; food
prices, service time and convenient location. This is to discover the importance ranking of
SERVQUAL and three new additional items after service patronization. Lastly, the correlation
analysis is run in order to define the relationship amongst the SERVQUAL dimensions. This study
is important as it will discover the impact and influence of service quality to customer satisfaction
and customer loyalty.

1.1 Service Quality

There are few existed models to measure the quality of service perceived by the customers and
the most famous model is SERVQUAL by Parasuraman et al. (1988). They developed SERVQUAL
instrument in order to measure customers’ perception on the received service that connects to the
customers’ expectation and gap which leads to satisfactorily indicator. SERVQUAL consists of five
dimensions which is tangibility (physical facilities, equipment, and personnel), reliability (ability to
perform the promised service dependably and precisely), assurance (knowledge and courtesy of
employees and their ability to inspire confidence), responsiveness (willingness to help customers and
provide prompt service) and empathy (individualized attention given to customers). SERVQUAL
model is chosen for this study due to its main advantage where it has been broadly used in many
literature and in common practices.

1.2 The association between service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty

As far as the success is concerned, service quality is determined as a major and critical element
that linked to customer satisfaction and loyalty and proven studies by many researchers have claimed
that service quality is an important element to customer satisfaction (Parasuraman et al., 1985; Cronin
and Taylor, 1992; Baker and Crompton, 2000; Lee et al., 2000; Caruana, 2002; Hong and Goo, 2004;
Ladhari, 2009). Some of the researchers have proved that satisfaction can act as a mediator between
service quality and loyalty where it has resulted to overall stronger effect on loyalty than service
quality. Yet, in many studies, many researchers have found that satisfaction alone is not a promised
element in achieving loyalty (Woodside et al., 1989; Cronin and Taylor, 1992; Kandampully and
Suhartanto, 2000; Lovelock and Wright, 2002; Hong and Goo, 2004; Ekinci et al., 2008; Faullant et
al., 2008). Many studies of brand loyalty have indicated that customer switching is a big problem
that affect firm’s sales and profits once the customers feel that they are generally satisfied to services
offered by their regular brand. Hence, firms are encouraged to ultimately serve and educate their
customers during service offerings in ensuring every customer reaches the maximum satisfaction
level. Apparently, major drop in loyalty is caused by unexpected drop in total satisfaction (Jones and
Sasser, 1995). Besides, the satisfied customers will act as our positive word of mouth agents and
recommending our services to others without the needs to invest in attracting new customers
(Lovelock and Wright, 2002).

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2. RESEARCH METHOD

Research Framework
This study adapts Parasuraman’s SERVQUAL dimensions and some modification have been
made based on Malaysia scenario. The dimensions are tangibility, assurance, responsiveness,
reliability, and empathy. In addition, in measuring experience for the level of service quality, three
new additional items were developed by Lee & Ulgado, (1997) for new item testing and they are
food prices, service time and convenient location for McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Malaysia.

Sample
Samples in this study were bachelor degree students from Universiti Malaysia Sabah-Labuan
International Campus. We have distributed 200 questionnaires, but only 180 respondents completed
and returned the questionnaires to make it usable for analysis purposes, which represents about 90%
response rate. University students were selected as sample because they have very huge purchasing
power to McDonald’s as they live in the era where fast-food is a daily consumption as well as it
created trending among them.

Instrumentation
This study used questionnaire as a medium to obtain the data needed, consisting of
Measurement of Experience Performance to Service Quality. Instrument used in this research is
adapted from Parasuraman et al. (1991) and Lee & Ulgado, (1997) using the SERVQUAL
Dimensions (Tangibility, Assurance, Reliability, Responsiveness and Empathy) by employing the
Likert Scale ranging from 1 for Strongly Disagree to 5 for Strongly Agree. The additional three new
items are also measured by using Likert Scale ranging from 1 for Strongly Disagree to 5 for Strongly
Agree.

Data Analysis Procedures

SPSS version 19 was used to run the data for a statistical results. The study also tested a
reliability of the instrument so that it enables to produce a robust and valid results.

3. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Table 1: Customer Profile

Frequency Percent
Gender Male 45 25.0
Female 135 75.0
Ethnic Group Bumiputera
144 80.0
Non-Bumiputera 36 20.0
Family size 1-2 persons 1 .6
3-4 persons 34 18.9
5 or more persons 145 80.6
Family total income Under RM5,000 158 87.8

RM5,001-RM6,000 10 5.6
RM6,001-RM7,000 4 2.2
RM7,001-RM8,000 3 1.7
RM8,001 and above 5 2.8
Consumption frequency Always 20 11.1
Usually 30 16.7
Sometimes 101 56.1
Seldom 24 13.3
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 Never 5 2.8
Familiarity with McDonald's Not all familiar 43 23.9
Malaysia Franchising
Restaurants

Not at all knowledgeable and little

experience 58 32.2
Very familiar 62 34.4
Very knowledgeable and considerable
experience 17 9.4

Table 1 shows the demographic profile of the respondents. It includes as well the consumption
frequency for each customer and their familiarity with McDonald’s Malaysia. Only 29 from 180
respondents were not really consumed McDonalds as it refers to “seldom” and “never”. However,
43.8% of the respondents is very familiar (n=62) and knowledgeable (n=17) in experiencing
McDonald’s services. This weakness result of contribution is shown due to the location, numbers of
outlet of McDonald’s and the purchasing power of the respondents.

Table 2: Reliability Analysis

Service Quality Dimensions Cronbach’s Alpha
Tangibility .796
Reliability .759
Responsiveness .764
Assurance .753
Empathy .713

The reliability analysis in Table 2 shown that Tangibility (.796), Responsiveness (.764), Reliability
(.759), Assurance (.753) and Empathy (.713) reflecting customers’ experience towards service
quality of McDonald’s. In general, the closer the reliability coefficient gets to 1.0, the better the result
is to be. Reliabilities less than 0.6 are considered to be poor, whilst those who are in the 0.7 ranges
is acceptable, and 0.8 ranging is considered to be good (Sekaran, 2006). It is proven that the
Cronbach’s alpha value for the Five (5) factors in this study ranged from .713 to 0.796. Therefore,
the internal consistency reliability of the measurement used in this study can be considered to be
acceptable.
Table 3: Descriptive Statistics
Mean Std. Deviation Ranking
Tangibility 3.5764 .70319 1
Reliability 3.3122 .64545 6
Responsiveness 3.3986 .69450 4
Assurance 3.4181 .69306 3
Empathy 3.3500 .74958 5
Price 2.9278 1.07293 8
Service Time 3.1611 1.07882 7
Location 3.5500 1.03176 2
Valid N (listwise)

According to Table 3, customers that had experiencing McDonald’s Malaysia have ranked the
Tangibility (3.5764) as the first priority to be the main dimension towards service quality, followed
by the Location (3.5500), Assurance (3.4181), Responsiveness (3.3986), Empathy (3.3500),
Reliability (3.3122), Service Time (3.1611) and Price (2.9278). Most of customers rated that
perceived services should focus on the physical condition of the fast food restaurant to make them
preferable to experience the good and quality services offered by McDonald’s Malaysia. In term of
Location, the respondents prefer if McDonald’s outlet can be placed conveniently to their reachable

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distance and easier to be reached. However, the respondents seem to agree on the McDonald’s Low
Food Prices factor because as to their knowledge the price of each meal is affordable and considered
to be cheap enough. Short Service Time factor is also not a big problem to the respondents due to
greater tolerance in waiting and being patience that they can accept.

Table 4: Correlations
Tangibility Reliability Responsiveness Assurance
Tangibility Pearson
Correlation
Sig. (2-tailed)
Reliability Pearson
.608(**)
Correlation
Sig. (2-tailed) .000
Responsiveness Pearson
.532(**) .688(**)
Correlation
Sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000
Assurance Pearson
.655(**) .614(**) .648(**)
Correlation
Sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000
Empathy Pearson
.620(**) .570(**) .597(**) .743(**)
Correlation
Sig. (2-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

In Table 4, results shown a positive relationship for each dimension in measuring Service Quality
dimensions of McDonald’s Malaysia. The relationship between empathy and assurance shown the
highest value of (.743) compared to others relationship. However, overall relationship is statistically
significant as accepted to be strong. Therefore, these results are proven contribution to the impact of
McDonald’s customers’ experience through quality services that lead to McDonald’s loyalty
creation.

4. CONCLUSION
As noted, SERVQUAL is a model that can be used to test customer experiences. Even there are
flaws and disadvantages but to some extent, the results of many studies of SERVQUAL have proven
significant values to theory and practices. This study used SERVQUAL model to test the reliability,
importance and correlation analysis of McDonald’s services in Malaysia. Results have shown
varieties of indication on defining satisfaction value, preferences indicator, relationships, and loyalty
creation. In this study also, three new additional items were developed and tested (Food Prices,
Service Time and Location). This new item testing is to determine significant level of importance
which can be recommended for future studies. By referring to the results of importance ranking, it is
clearly stated that Location has been chosen by the respondent to become the second ranking of
important factor that need to be wisely discussed and plan by McDonald’s Malaysia for their future
planning and strategies. The other two new additional items were rated to be the lowest amongst all.
Therefore, Location will become future important factor that need to be included in the research
framework and studies. Through the results, surprisingly Reliability has been ranked by the
respondents to be at the bottom three of being importance to this study. Researchers believe that this
situation happened due to promising value that McDonald’s has established and portrayed since the
day they been operated in Malaysia; promised services with less hassle and failures. Therefore,
McDonald’s is seen to be reliable at anytime and anywhere. As far as the correlation is referred, the
relationship amongst all dimensions in SERVQUAL that have been tested in this study have shown
moderate and strong relationship that correlate each other above 0.5 value. Thus, the current findings
of this study is in line with other studies that have focused in fast food industry (Etemad-Sajadi &
Rizzuto, 2013; Min & Min 2013; Min & Min, 2011; Qin, Prybutok, & Zhao, 2010 and Gilbert,
Veloutsou, Goode, & Moutinho, 2004) and private higher education institutions (Hasan, Ilias,
5
Rahman, & Razak, 2009). With the positive reviews by the customers, it is suggested that this study
should proceed to further testing the new additional item (Location) to be combined with
SERVQUAL dimensions in other scope of study where limitations will be reduced and focus will be
strengthened.

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