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Through the lens of a total quality management approach, this paper aims to examine the effects of health-care service quality on patient satisfaction, repatronage intention (RI) and positive word-of mouth (PWOM) at a public hospital specialized in women and children’s diseases. The contribution is to measure and compare patient expectations and perceptions related to the public health service quality.

A structured questionnaire was distributed to in-patients who stayed at a public training and research hospital for at least three days. To analyze the relationship between variables, multiple regression analysis was used. To test the difference between expected and perceived service quality, the paired-sample t-test was used.

The findings provided empirical evidence that perceived service quality significantly influenced patient satisfaction, RI and PWOM. The “responsiveness and reliability” factor was found to be the most influential on patient RI and PWOM. The “tangibility” dimension had the strongest influence on patient satisfaction.

The results reveal that a reliable and responsive service, empathic personnel behaviors and appropriate tangibles are the outstanding factors for high levels of patient satisfaction, RI and PWOM.

Although the concepts of perceived service quality, patient satisfaction, RI and PWOM are explored frequently in service literature, there are few researches that focus on specialized health services for women and children’s diseases. By evaluating the service quality, it is hoped to provide an insight to health-care managers about the service quality dimensions and their relationship with patient satisfaction, RI and PWOM, specifically based on women patients.

The purpose of this paper is to present a multidimensional evaluation of brand equity performance incorporating dimensions adopted from the balance scorecard (BSC) approach to business performance.

In this study, text mining is used for automatic extraction of valuable information from textual data such as the financial reports of firms. Instead of expert opinions, linguistic scales built upon outcomes of text mining are used as inputs for decision-making. The proposed model combines fuzzy DEMATEL (FDEMATEL), fuzzy ANP (FANP), fuzzy TOPSIS (FTOPSIS) and fuzzy VIKOR (FVIKOR) methods for weighting criteria and ranking alternatives.

Using data from five privatized firms in Turkey, the study’s findings demonstrate that the customer is the most important dimension of brand equity performance evaluation. Cash flow and brand loyalty are identified as the most important criteria in the measurement of brand equity performance.

Findings highlight the importance of firms taking action to increase consumer perceptions, attitudes and behaviors in the privatization processes. For this purpose, privatized firms need to understand the expectations of customers to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and therefore improve brand equity.

The paper contributes to literature in several important ways. First, by adopting the BSC approach, it proposes a holistic and a multidimensional model for measuring brand equity performance. Second, the study offers a novel methodology using a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making model designed for the fuzzy environment. Third, the study uses the knowledge extraction tool of text mining in the fuzzy decision-making process. Finally, the study evaluates the brand equity performance of privatized firms in an emerging country context.