The Assimilation of Marketing’s Service
Quality Principles and the IT Auditing Process
A Move Toward Quantifiable SAS 70 Auditing Service
Quality, Part 2
Thomas J. Bell III, Ph.D.,
CISA, PMP, is a professor
of business administration
in the School of Business at
Texas Wesleyan University
in Fort Worth, Texas, USA,
and an IT security auditor
for ComputerMinds.com in
Euless, Texas, USA. His IT
auditing specialty is IT audits
for small community banks (IT
security audits and external
penetration testing) and
SAS 70 Type I and II audits.
This article is the continuation of “The
Assimilation of Marketing’s Service Quality
Principles and the IT Auditing Process: A Move
Toward Quantifiable SAS 70 Auditing Service
Quality, Part 1” (published in vol. 3, 2011), which
suggests that broad quality auditing principles
for organizations are realized through controlled
processes and procedures. Increasingly, service
businesses are finding that sustained profitability
is related to delivering service quality. Delivering
service quality seems to be a prerequisite for
business success, or, at a minimum, a prerequisite
for a business to stay afloat in an increasingly
competitive market. Auditing procedures should
deliver quality via processes that are defined,
controlled, communicated and executed.
Such processes contribute to the concept of
continuous improvement.
However, to close the continuous improvement
loop, W. Edwards Deming’s plan-do-check-act (PDCA) model suggests that all processes
must be measured iteratively, and SERVQUAL
has proved to be an accepted instrument for
measuring service quality across several service
industries. SERVQUAL is an objective instrument
for measuring service quality from the customer
judgment vantage point.
The purpose of this article is twofold: to
describe the development of a multiple-item
scale for measuring service quality and to discuss
SERVQUAL properties and assimilation with
Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70
auditing services. This topic is of importance
because of the distinct challenges associated
with measuring service quality attributes, which
are unlike physical products with tangible
characteristics that lend themselves to some form
of measurement such as dimensions, appearance,
texture, packaging and color. Understanding
and measuring services can be significantly more
difficult than understanding and measuring
tangible products. Services have no physical
attributes to measure; thus, the essential nature
of the service should be considered from the
customer’s perspective.
Thomas Smith, Ph.D., is
a professor of marketing
and mass communication
in the School of Business at
Texas Wesleyan University in
Fort Worth, Texas, USA. His
publications include articles
about advertising theories
and practices in addition
to creative marketing. He
also has decades of service
marketing experience.
Do you have
something
to say about
this article?
Visit the Journal pages
of the ISACA web site
( www.isaca.org/journal),
find the article, and
choose the Comments
tab to share your
thoughts.
SERVQUAL ASSIMILATION INTO SAS 70 AUDITING
Because of the elusive and abstract nature of
quality and services, there is no objective measure
to assess service quality. In the absence of an
objective measure, the customers’ perception
of quality has been used as a measure to assess
service quality. 1 An obvious way of obtaining a
better understanding of customers’ perceptions,
needs and expectations is to ask them. However,
prior to asking, it is useful to put some research
into obtaining a view of an enterprise’s services
from its customers’ perspective.
A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml and
Leonard L. Berry defined service quality as
a customer’s judgment regarding the firm’s
excellence or superiority with emphasis on
perceived quality as a defining factor of service
quality. 2 According to Sylvie Llosa, Jean-Louis Chandon and Chiara Orsingher, service
quality is an attitude or belief that is the result
of expectations and perceived performance. 3
Customer assessment of service quality is often
achieved by comparing the service that is actually
experienced with the customer’s expectations. 4
Alternatively stated, customers rate the quality
of services by the gap between perceived and
expected service.
The Reliability, Assurance, Tangible, Empathy
and Responsiveness (RATER) multidimensional
model5 (figure 1) forms a structure of service
quality sufficient for measuring SAS 70 service
quality by using a performance and expectations
