Application of Kansei engineering in Thai government hospitals
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Abstract
Nowadays, Thai health care sector is a highly competitive. All health care services focus on improving the levels of service quality in different ways. Hospital is one part of the health care sector. Most hospitals have to increase competitiveness by enhancing both service quality and customer emotions. Customer emotion is one of the key factors to improve service quality. Kansei Engineering or Affective Engineering can translate customer emotions into products and service designs. This method determines the relationships between customer feelings and design attributes. This study applied KE which can account to customer needs in service design. More specifically, the author applied KE with SERVQUAL model in order to classify health care service attributes. SERVQUAL is an instrument for measuring service quality and obtaining a higher predictive of customer satisfaction. Thai government hospitals were selected as the domain of a study. One hundred participants who have previous experience with government hospitals took part in the questionnaire survey. The reliability of a pilot test was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha. The relationships between customer emotions and service attributes were analyzed using multiple linear regressions. The result of this study shows that "friendly" was the most significant of customer emotions. The modern equipment and the patients feeling safe in transactions of hospital should be focused by health care executives for service attribute improvement.
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Published manuscript are the rights of their original owners and RMUTSB Academic Journal. The manuscript content belongs to the authors' idea, it is not the opinion of the journal's committee and not the responsibility of Rajamangala University of Technology Suvarnabhumi
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