Determining the Priority of Critical Service Attributes: An Integrated Model and an Empirical Case Study in the Higher Education Sector

Today, higher education institutions (HEIs) are realizing the significance of customer-oriented philosophies and quality management systems to help manage their operations on educational services. This paper starts with a review of some previous models and then outlines the results of a study conducted on students at selected Indonesian HEIs to obtain student perspectives of the service quality of those institutions. An integration of the Kano and customer-oriented models using structural equation modeling was applied to determine the priority of critical service attributes in higher education. This integrated model was illustrated empirically in a case study of the industrial engineering departments of four well-known private universities in Jakarta, Indonesia.