Abstract:
This research was performed to measure and to make a priority of service quality improvement at Felege Hiwot Referral Hospital by using the integration of SERVQUAL and KANO Models into Quality Function Deployment (QFD). This proposed approach aims to help service providers to evaluate customer satisfaction and to improve the service quality at Felege Hiwot Referral Hospital. The descriptive-survey study was conducted with the distribution of 6 Hospital management staff and 400 patients. The standard questionnaire of the SERVQUAL and KANO Model has been used as the main research tool. Strengths and weaknesses of hospital services of a well-known Felege Hiwot Referral Hospital are defined by using a service quality scale (SERVQUAL). Our findings in the Felege Hiwot Referral Hospital service quality performance are found to be weak. Then service quality attributes are categorized using the KANO Model to see how well these attributes can satisfy customer needs and findings are transferred to quality function deployment (QFD). The findings of KANO and SERVQUAL models show that 20 service quality attributes can be categorized as “one-dimension” and 1 service quality attributes can be categorized as “must-be” were analyzed using the KANO Model, which means that customer needs are chosen to be improved. Through the QFD method, 7 of the total 10 technical requirements are properly proposed to answer the customer needs. From the results of the QFD application, it is seen that the staff should be ready and fast to respond has the highest relative weight score; meaning that when the staff should be ready and fast to respond is improved there will be almost 23.7% of improvement in the hospital. Another finding was there is a strong positive relationship with providing a comfortable waiting room and having enough and modern equipment, while it has a positive relationship with the general atmosphere of the hospital.