Abstract
Doing business in today’s economy is going further than simply setting prices and quantities, in fact, in many products and services categories, service quality and customer satisfaction have become extremely important for organizations in order to be more competitive, to grow, and therefore to succeed. For this reason, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate throughout the SERVQUAL model how employees of the Aviva headquarter in Dublin, Ireland, perceive their workplace canteen service quality and how satisfy they are with this service. To achieve this, both primary and secondary research methods were applied. A variety of theories and concepts focusing on service, quality, customer satisfaction, the SERVQUAL model and the catering industry, needed to be examined to provide a proper background for the investigation. In order to collect the data, 100 questionnaires were handled personally by the researcher to the Aviva employees, but unfortunately only 95 were filled up correctly which determined the size of the sample. The analysis of the data was done using Microsoft Excel 2010. It was found out that in general, the service quality perceived by the employees of the Aviva headquarter, regarding to the canteen catering service in their workplace is seen as low, and therefore they are not satisfied with it. This is mainly caused because these consumers presented to have higher expectations of a canteen service quality in comparison to what they actually perceive. Additionally, the results could show to the catering management where failures are, and therefore to take the actions to amend them in order to improve and provide a better service. Author keywords: Service, service quality, SERVQUAL, catering industry, customer satisfaction
