The Assessment of the Customers’ Expectations and Perceptions Towards the Quality of Educational Services : the Case of Industrial Engineering and Management programme at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology)

Abstract: The services sector is the largest economic sector in the world. In addition, the services sector is growing relative to the rest of the economy even in the countries that are still industrialising. The services sector consists of many subsectors, e.g. education, which currently is the largest global market after health care. Higher education has had a rapid increase in the number of students worldwide. In the Swedish educational scene Industrial Engineering and Management, a Master of Science programme, has long been one of the most applied to engineering-programmes in the country. Every year the average grade needed to be able to get accepted to the education has gotten higher. With these facts presented it can be argued that some of Sweden’s most prominent students apply to the specific education and university. When applying to Industrial Engineering and Management at KTH, these students have an expectation of what they will be attaining if attending. After experiencing the education and the university, the students will have a perception of the educational service. The university can be viewed as a service provider, where the service provided is the education, and the students at the university are the customers. Meeting or exceeding the expectations of customers is what the success of a service organisation depends on. It is therefore necessary to understand what determinates the satisfaction of the service after it is provided. If an organisation or a company does not have this understanding the service will not satisfy the customers.   The purpose of this study is to investigate and assess the existing gap, if any, between the perception and expectation of students at Industrial Engineering and Management programme at KTH. The main research questions addressed for the study thus are: What is the customer’s perception towards the quality of service provided? What is the customer’s expectation towards the quality of service provided? Does the quality of provided services meet the student’s expectation? Is there a gap between the existing perception and expectation?  The information is collected through an online survey tool sent out to five clusters of students of the education. The overall finding of the research study is that the customer’s perception towards the quality of the service provided is less than than the expectation’s of the quality of the serviced provided, which has created a negative gap between the customer’s perception and expectation. The quality of the provided services of the Industrial Engineering and Management programme at KTH does therefore not meet the student’s expectation.