The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the order of presentation of attribute scales in Service Quality surveys that use the SERVQUAL instrument in combination to a ranking of the attributes. It is hoped that the paper will be of interest to quality research practitioners. The real case presented here applies the most recent, 3-columns version of SERVQUAL to evaluate service quality of Brazilian postal services from a convenience sample of 540 clients firms. To avoid having to rank 39 attributes, an intermediary procedure (based on a shorter list of attributes and weighting scheme) is proposed. Four different ways of placing the 39 quality attributes have been used to test for the existence of an order effect. The test of both Pearson and Spearman correlations coefficients (calculated for each pair select from those versions) has rejected the null hypothesis of inexistence of the order effect. One interesting implication is that the original list of 22 attributes may be then increased to take into account specific of a particular service.
service quality; quality attributes; service quality evaluation; marketing research
