Over the years, a number of papers have discussed the importance of measuring service quality based on the assessment of external customers. However, industrial organizations should also consider internal service performance evaluations as a means to achieve continuous process improvement. Therefore, researchers have suggested that the quality of internal services in industrial organizations should be assessed through the same instruments as those used by external customers to assess service quality. This paper therefore compares two instruments, SERVPERF and SERVQUAL, and their weighted variants, resulting in four instruments that are applied to evaluate the quality of internal services of a company operating in the mechanical industry. The context for this comparison was the internal services provided by the maintenance department of a manufacturer of precision tools and metrology equipment to the company's manufacturing cells. Data were taken from questionnaires answered by the maintenance department's users and the results were statistically analysed. The results obtained through the various instruments were found to be comparable to those reported in the literature, indicating that the use of the SERVPERF and SERVQUAL scales were suitable for assessing the service quality of the maintenance department, without restrictions regarding their validity and reliability.
service quality; SERVQUAL; SERVPERF; internal customers; quality dimensions
