The most important objective of service quality is the retention of the customer to provide repeatability of services through customer satisfaction. Since customer perceptions and expectations affect the service quality, this study helps to understand and identify the service quality gaps in services provided by cab aggregators to customers in India using SERVQUAL Gap Analysis between perception and expectation. The main objective of this chapter is to understand, study, and compare the customer perception and expectations from customers using services of the cab aggregators within India to identify the areas of service quality gaps. Primary data was collected from 495 respondents from various cities across different demographic variables such as gender, age, income, education, and occupation. The responses were taken using Google Forms, which is consolidated in an Excel sheet. It is suggested to also create a service quality framework for cab aggregators on the basis of service quality gaps identified in the current study.
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Transportation services are the activities designed to help a person to travel or making goods move from one place to another. The movement of people or goods could be through land, water, or air. Transportation enables people to move from one place to another and is therefore an important need of people on daily basis through numerous civilizations. It helps in translating human needs in different parts of the world through commercial, agricultural, and industrial evolution. In ancient times, people used to walk, ropes were used to transport goods. However, things started changing slowly and animals were used as means of transport to carry people and goods from one place to another followed by invention of a wooden cart used for transportation on land. And then one day, people were able to freely sail, sail through boats, and then came a remarkable invention of horse-drawn vehicle. Without doubt, modern transportation has developed over a period. Other progressive means of development in the field of transportation has been the invention of steam engine, the steam trains. Discovery of natural gas and oil have contributed immensely to humankind in fulfilling their needs by inventing different modes of transport including bus, truck, car, two wheelers that run on petrol, diesel or gas followed by air transport. With the advent of technology advancement, life has become smooth with transportation available through different kind of cars and aircrafts, trains, submarines, and space conveyance.
Trade seemed to be simpler, secure, well timed, prompt, dependable and advantageous that enhanced standard of living globally. Different objects were sent across the world in exchange for other products. With technological development in transportation every time, world started getting closer resulting in 50% reduction in flight times. Thus, different places in the world can be reached in shorter period. Cab Industry globally has a very crucial role to play in our society in fulfilling the basic need of traveling from one place to another. Cabs are extremely important means of transport for people who either don’t have their own car or are not keen on using public means of transport due to their choice especially in cities and urban areas. Cabs are considered an easy, accessible, and dependable source of transport thereby becoming a preferred medium of transport globally in a short span of time. With the increase in living standard of people, development in Technology and Telecom facilities, change in people’s preferences have led to the immense growth of app-based cab services globally. Thus, it can be concluded that Cab Industry really helps in simplifying our life by achieving our transportation goals and needs at the click of a button on our smart phone.
(Basu, 2019) mentioned in his study about Indian taxi market. This consists of markets which are either organized or unorganized. Estimated value of unorganized taxi market is $8.5 billion dollar while value of organized market is appx $500 million. The growth forecast of Indian taxi market is 13.7% from 2017-22 (Khade and Patil, 2018). Transport development in a city is closely related to its development index, it’s social, economic, and technological level. With the changing scenario as per the global landscape, customer expectations, smart phone usage increasing and considering the evolution in technology, the traditional taxi services have transformed to app-based cab services working on technology. It has been observed as per the findings of this study that maximum number of travellers were happy with factors like ease of availability and booking, convenience, dependability, safety, driver behavior, option to pay apart from cash, overall pricing provided by the app-based cab services to its customers.
Cab aggregator is a marketplace that can be used by customers to connect with a driver for moving from one place to another. In other words, as per cab aggregator Model definition, it is a business and network model whereby the concerned firm collects information about a service provider, thus collaborating and forming their partners, thereby selling services of the service providers under its brand name. Some of the Cab aggregators providing services are currently available in India are Ola Cabs, Uber, Meru Cabs, Carzonrent, Savaari, Fasttrack Taxi Mega Cabs, Tab Cab, BlaBla car and so on. The reason for success of Uber and other cab aggregator service providers can be attributed to its business model as compared to the traditional taxi services.