Introducing the relativity to traditional importance-performance analysis

The ability to identify critical operating issues has been a challenge for service organizations. Many approaches have utilized the combination of importance and performance scores. These approaches typically involve a direct question on the importance of, and performance on, various service attributes. The results are then separated into various classifications. There has been some debate about whether consumers can accurately indicate what is important in their evaluation of a service organization. Research in this area suggests using correlation or regression to identify relative importance of attributes. This research introduces the concept of relative importance to the traditional importance-performance analysis. Importance- performance classifications using both methods are discussed.