Service Quality and Library User Satisfaction Among Universities in Kenya

Abstract

Service quality and customer satisfaction are key concepts that organizations must appreciate in order to remain competitive in any business environment. More importantly is the need for organizations to understand and be able to measure these constructs from the customer’s point of view to enable them better understand and satisfy their needs. This study had three objectives: To determine library user expectations and perceptions levels among universities in Kenya; to determine the levels of service quality in libraries among universities in Kenya; to examine whether there exist any relationship between service quality and library user satisfaction among universities in Kenya. A Standardized questionnaire was developed from the SERVQUAL instrument derived from the works of Parasuraman et al. (1988) and distributed to respondents from across the universities in Kenya. Regression analysis was used to bring out the relationship between these variables. From the analysis, it was established that service quality has a statistically significant positive effect on user satisfaction represented by R2 (Coefficient of determination) with a value of 73.9%. This in essence implies that service quality accounts for 73.9% of library user satisfaction among universities in Kenya. The findings further reveal that Reliability dimension contributes most towards user satisfaction while Empathy dimension contributes the least. The results also indicate that the libraries cannot afford to ignore any of these other dimensions since they all appear to influence customer satisfaction although at different degrees. This study contributes to the existing studies examining service quality and library user satisfaction using the SERVQUAL model, and its empirical results could be helpful to the library management in helping to bridge service quality gaps. The researcher recommended that since this study focused only on university libraries in Kenya, future studies could broaden the scope and look into more categories of libraries. Service quality is also found to influence 73.9% of user satisfaction, meaning that the remaining 26.1% was due to other factors. Future studies could also investigate the composition of this other percentage (26.1%).