Service Quality Evaluation and Improvement
You have been hired as director of an important five stars hotel. The previous manager told you before leaving that you should not worry about quality as there are few complaints from customers. Do you agree with this comment? If not propose means for service quality evaluation and improvement.
A definition of quality, especially for what services is concerned, is extremely challenging to find. In a world like that of luxury hotels, quality can mean a lot of different things depending on how each customers values it and what the customer is expecting. Five-star hotels rely, for its nature, on satisfying needs of highly demanding customers, thus focusing on quality seems essential.
The fact that the hotel so far has received few complaints might not be a direct synonym of good service quality itself, since many are the variables that might have led to this effect. Indeed, quality control and complain tools available to customers might not have been sufficiently in place, customers might have not complained but may not be returning (e.g., it makes me think of business men who might not have the time to formally complain but that will instruct company’s travel agency not to send them to that hotel ever again). In any case, in order not to lose high margin customers and not to ruin its reputation, a five-star hotel should always be looking at ways to improve service quality.
In this paper we would analyze the following:
1. Process variability, which determine different levels of service quality
2. The importance of service quality: service quality value chain
3. Tools to improve and evaluate service quality in the hotel
1. Briefly, in order to build and monitor an efficient service quality management tool, we need to take into consideration the fact that all processes are subject to variability, which determines different level of output quality. If this is true in the manufacturing process, variability plays a much more important role when dealing with services and
A definition of quality, especially for what services is concerned, is extremely challenging to find. In a world like that of luxury hotels, quality can mean a lot of different things depending on how each customers values it and what the customer is expecting. Five-star hotels rely, for its nature, on satisfying needs of highly demanding customers, thus focusing on quality seems essential.
The fact that the hotel so far has received few complaints might not be a direct synonym of good service quality itself, since many are the variables that might have led to this effect. Indeed, quality control and complain tools available to customers might not have been sufficiently in place, customers might have not complained but may not be returning (e.g., it makes me think of business men who might not have the time to formally complain but that will instruct company’s travel agency not to send them to that hotel ever again). In any case, in order not to lose high margin customers and not to ruin its reputation, a five-star hotel should always be looking at ways to improve service quality.
In this paper we would analyze the following:
1. Process variability, which determine different levels of service quality
2. The importance of service quality: service quality value chain
3. Tools to improve and evaluate service quality in the hotel
1. Briefly, in order to build and monitor an efficient service quality management tool, we need to take into consideration the fact that all processes are subject to variability, which determines different level of output quality. If this is true in the manufacturing process, variability plays a much more important role when dealing with services and