The Assessment of Internal Service Quality Perception of System Administrators - Case of Services Provided by Data Centre Hosting to Local Bank in South Africa

This study assesses the perception of service quality provided by data hosting companies to system administrators at one of South Africa's five major banks in Johannesburg in terms of the difference between the expected quality level and the actual service quality received to suggest recommendations aimed at resolving the issues that would be exposed. The SERVQUAL model was adopted in the survey design to classify key service quality dimensions. With a 100^% response rate, an analysis of the gap score was conducted on the data collected. The findings showed that such an exercise has never been conducted at the company over the past five years, and it indicated that the overall quality of service is at its lowest as perceived by system administrators which leads to a constantly decreasing level of customer satisfaction. From the evaluation of all the quality dimensions, none of them met customers satisfaction criteria, with all the dimensions presenting negative gap scores. The study recommends that data hosting centers should implement data center service quality (DCSQ) to successfully meet the quality service expectations of system administrators.