Functional Quality

Recently, I had to ring up a luxury restaurant Aqua Shard enquiring to book a private dining room for a birthday dinner. As the restaurant is located in such exclusive environment, prides itself on being one of the top restaurants, offers relatively high prices, suggests on their website that you can email or call to make reservations and as I was going to make a booking for a substantial amount of people all these things influenced my expected service to a particularly high standard. The expected service included friendly and helpful staff, quick and detailed response to my calls and emails and good after-care e.g.- reminding emails. Once I tried to ring up the restaurant I had to try to do so every 2 hours or even the next day since “All the lines were busy” both weekends and weekdays. Secondly although staff were very friendly took down my details, I did not receive any emails or calls. Once I rang for the third time they provided me with an event organizer’s number who did not pick up the whole day eventually they took down my details and haven’t heard from them since. Therefore the technical quality of the service in terms of what I received was relatively low since I only received one email confirming they received mine. Functional quality in terms of how I received the service was even lower but still relatively low since apart from the friendliness I did not hear from them again regarding any of my requests. Therefore the perceived value as I defined it above decreased, as the restaurant was being unrealistic with their promises. Therefore my expected value exceeded my experienced quality leading to me being very disappointed with the service and never wanting to book this restaurant