I’ve been reading Douglas W. Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything. A sentence jumped out at me: “Some of the most important strategic proposals were being overlooked in favor of minor cost-savings ideas simply because everyone knew how to measure some things and didn’t know how to measure others.” (p. 4). This statement brings to mind the difficulty of measuring intangible variables like service quality.
It helped to begin to see measurement as the task of reducing uncertainty. We don’t have to know everything about service quality. Even if we see a slight improvement in our knowledge about quality, we’ve reduced our uncertainty about quality, and we’ve increased our chances of making effective decisions about it.
If we don’t know what to measure, it can help to measure anyway, because the act of measuring may reveal what we should measure. Measurement is iterative. You learn from each successive wave.
The trick with assessing quality is to define it first. Different stakeholders will probably define quality differently. But once you have some ideas about observable aspects of quality—improved turnover rates, for example, or increased employee organizational commitment—then you have a sense of what quality can be to some people. Put the definitions in the context of the decision problem, and see if uncertainty has been reduced. If it has, then you have just assessed the mysteriously intangible variable of service quality.
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