Short history of the theories regarding services quality

We could all observe how much has the importance of quality increased in every buyer’s life in the case of a product as well as in the case of a service. The term quality comes from the Latin “qualis”, which means “of the kind that” and it has been used as far back as the antiquity by the philosophers of the period, Cicero and Aristotle (Stanciu, 2005). The first standard related to quality control appeared in 1935 and it was called “Applying the statistical methods to the industrial standardization and to the industrial quality control”. After the Second World War, quality was approached more and more as a managerial function and in 1960 Japan chose the month of November to be the national month of quality, which, in a little while after that, transformed into the month of quality in the world. 1986 is the year in which the first international standard ISO 8402 appeared, standard concerning the terminology in the field of quality. Another important year is 1988 because in the United States of America, the “Malcom Baldrige” National Award for Quality was awarded to Motorola for the first time, due to the performances obtained in the field of quality. Nowadays, when the buyers’ and society’s exigencies are increasingly greater and the competition is much more ruthless, the following can be easily observed: quality has become “the strategic instrument of any company’s global management” because it is what can maintain its loyal customers and, at the same time, attract new buyers for the products or services offered by any company.