Comparing Fuzzy and Grey Measurement Approaches to Assess Factors Influencing Consumer Experience

Abstract

Recently, insights derived from consumer experience (CX) have gained increased traction in service businesses, mainly due to an ability to indicate service quality in an improved way. Amid the rapid growth of private healthcare sector, it is imperative for healthcare managers to identify and understand relatively sensitive dimensions of CX to provide consumers with the highest quality of care and personalized care experience. This study aims to detect and prioritize the influence of distinct CX antecedents that individually or collectively shape the consumers' perception of hospital service quality. A cross-sectional study was conducted across 13 mid-tier corporate hospitals to collect data from 438 patients. Further, the responses were processed through factor analysis in SPSS to analyze factor loadings and statistical validity. Two independent multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tools comprising Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) were parallelly conducted to compare performance ratings of CX dimensions. Factors such as ‘information’ and ‘hospital environment’ received higher performance ratings, while items related to ‘communication with doctors’ and ‘humanistic care’ received lower rankings. Such performance ratings will help stakeholders and managers to identify key consumer response areas, aiding in improvement of service delivery quality.