An original approach to the Gap Model with regard to the business insurance sector

Abstract

Service providers, including business insurance, are looking for solutions to offer services of the best possible quality, including an assessment of that quality. For this reason, the attempt to apply the Gap Model was to demonstrate how other methods could be used to assess service quality, as opposed to assessing the quality of a typical product. Most of the methods used today are based on the difference between the expectations of customers of business insurance companies and their perception of the service offered. The observed difference is one of the gaps in the service quality model—the so-called Gap Model. For the purpose of this analysis, the literature that has been published so far on the subject was used. The model has been verified based on a survey conducted among 20 experts from Poland and abroad from the world of science and practice, including insurance companies. In comparison with traditional models, the proposed model includes the basic assumptions of the SERVQUAL strategy in an insurance company. The main aim of the study was to compare different variants described in the literature on the subject—the Gap Model. The article is a theoretical study and the tangible effect is to acquaint the readers with the basic elements of the Gap Model, on the one hand, and to present the author’s own Gap Model with respect to the business insurance sector, on the other hand.

Keywords

• service quality
• gap model
• expectations of customers
• insurance companies
• business insurance