Analysing service quality in the education sector: An application with the integration of quality function deployment and multi-criteria decision-making methods

The level of social and economic development of countries varies depending on the level of education and acts in a direct relationship with the quality on education services provided. The quality of educational services, which shapes the future of societies and is an inherited heritage, is accepted as a prerequisite for the survival of educational institutions in today's highly competitive world. Therefore, educational institutions aim to develop their activities with a success-oriented perspective and design them in accordance with student expectations in order to maintain their competitive structure and meet student expectations. In this respect, it is important to plan improvements by evaluating educational services and to distribute the limited resources allocated for educational services in the right way. In this study, it is aimed to evaluate the service quality in the education sector based on the integration of Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Quality Functional Deployment (QFD) methods. The sample of this research, which has almost no examples in terms of the method used and the sector in which it is applied, consists of 250 students at higher education level who have been educated in foreign language courses in 25 different provinces in Turkey. In the study, in addition to the service quality dimensions developed by Parasuraman et al. (1986), a modified SERVQUAL scale with 6 dimensions including "Digital Transformation" has been used. As a result of the weighting of these dimensions with FAHP analysis, it has been determined that the criterion with the highest level of importance is "Assurance", followed by "Reliability", "Responsiveness", "Empathy", "Digital Transformation" and "Tangibility". In the study, various inferences have been made and policy recommendations have been presented by conducting a QFD process integrated with the FAHP method. In addition to all these, a new model for categorising student expectations is proposed to be developed and tested in future research. This model provides a classification example based on the identity of the expectation and consists of 6 headings: "Expectations Regarding the Instructor", "Expectations Regarding Curriculum and Resources", "Expectations Regarding Physical Facilities", "Expectations Regarding Institutional Culture", "Expectations Regarding Social Benefits" and "Expectations Regarding Digitalisation".