Importance‐performance analysis for improving quality of campus food service

Managing service operations has continued to assume greater importance in most developed economies. This is in view of the ubiquity of service organizations and operations, the associated large workforce, and the substantial contribution of the service sector to the gross domestic product of most of these countries. In order to be successful, it is extremely important for service managers to be able to appraise their activities over time by using pertinent information derived from their customers. This paper demonstrates the use of the importance‐performance analysis framework to assist management of a campus food service organization to improve its services. It also studies the relative effects of implicit and explicit weighting methods on importance ranking as well as the grid‐classification of service quality attributes. Furthermore, analysis of the factor structure of the attributes indicates, like some other reported studies, that the five‐dimensional factor structure postulated for services in the literature was not confirmed for the campus food service scenario studied.