2 pages double space summary for each PPT. 3 total.
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HRT476Ch.3ServiceQualityII.pptService Quality II:
Measuring Service Quality
HRT476
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Chapter 3 Discussion Points:
How to assess and measure service quality?
Explain Pros and Cons of each approach to measure service quality? (9 different approaches are explained here.)
How to create Service Quality Index (SQI)? Handout shoes Fedex example. You can create your own SQI at your current workplace.
This chapter is also related to your Individual Research Project – Assessing Service Quality. You have to choose a mix of different approaches to assess service quality of your chosen property. Observation through site inspections, interviews with service employees, analyzing guests reviews available online, using/tasting their services and products through mystery shopping, etc. Key is you have to analyze it in terms of FIVE Dimensions of service quality: Reliability, Empathy, Tangibles, Assurance, & Responsiveness. Good luck for your individual research project!
Agenda
- Methods to collect guest feedbacks & measure guests’ perception of service quality
- Surveys (Total market, Annual, & Transactional)
- Management Observation
- Employee Feedback
- Personal Customer Interview
- Service Feedback (Comment) Cards
- Critical Incident Technique (CIT)
- Focus Group Discussion
- Mystery Shopping
- Service Quality Index (SQI)
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Customer feedback is the basis for effective management decisions. Then the question is how to best get it. Several methods are commonly used to accomplish this task. Each method has its own particular strengths and weaknesses, depending on what is being measured.
Surveys
- Measure customer satisfaction with customer service processes and specific service/products
- Total market, Annual, & Transactional etc.
- Transactional surveys (Intercept surveys): Typically conducted after customers have completed a specific transaction
- Advantages:
- Tell how satisfied your customers are
- Obtain a global index or indicator of overall service quality and customer satisfaction for the entire firm
- Ability to gather valid & representative samples (database marketing)
- Disadvantages:
- Cannot tell why they are happy or unhappy (open ended questions)
- Time-lag & effect of memory retention
- Customer inconvenience
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Management Observation
- Managers take a step back from operational duties to observe & analyze many interactions
- Simplest & least expensive technique
- Advantages:
- Identify real-time service problems and sources of customer complaints\inconvenience
- Minimal inconvenience to the customers
- Disadvantages:
- Require highly specialized training for observers
- Ethical concerns in relation to invasion of privacy
- Intimidated by the constant pressure of mgnt. observation
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Observation measures have been widely applied within hospitality and tourism industry. Because this measure is the simplest and least expensive technique. It causes minimal inconvenience to the customers because the observation is conducted without the customer’s knowledge. Many hospitality organizations today inform both customers and employees that they are being observed for he purpose of quality improvement. One possible disadvantage is that employees may under-perform because they may feel pressured.
Employee Feedback
- Employees are used as vehicles for gathering information about customer perceptions of service quality
- Daily or weekly basis by means of one-to-one reporting, departmental interviews, or employee report cards
- Advantages:
- Gain firsthand & up-to-the-minute customer feedback
- Problems can be fixed immediately or prior to guest departure
- Boost employee morale in terms of satisfaction derived from an immediate service recovery
- Disadvantages:
- Employee bias: Fraction of what should be reported
- Employees may be selective with the truth
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Service quality is the quality of interactions between service providers and customers. Therefore, it only makes sense that employee feedbacks of customer perceptions can be an effective tool to measure service quality. Most customers feel at ease with frontline service personnel and often like to talk about the service they receive. Also, they directly report any service failure to the front line employees. So, it is a great tool to gain customers feedbacks of service quality.
Customer Interview
- Most effective technique for achieving a deeper understanding of customer perceptions
- Interviews must be carefully structured and follow a closely worded script with little room for deviation
- Advantages:
- Richness of information & it is current
- Customer (interviewee) may feel valued & cared
- Disadvantages:
- Time and expenses required to conduct interviews
- Specialized training required
- Customer intrusion (Customer inconvenience) issues
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Service Feedback Cards (Comment Cards)
- Commonly used powerful and inexpensive tool
- Customers rate the quality of individual service attributes & overall service quality on a pre-determined scale
- Advantages:
- Simplicity in terms of data collection – No further employee effort or time in terms of administration
- Yield specific feedback on what works well and what doesn’t
- Provide a warm, caring attitude to guests – Pleasure to fill in
- Disadvantages:
- Voluntary customer participation –
- Collected information may not reflect general customer feeling
- Time-lag factor – Weekly analysis: too late for the recovery
- Overrepresentation of customers – reliability/representativeness
Low response rate
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Critical Incident Technique (CIT)
- Designed to elicit details about services that particularly dissatisfy or delight customers
- A critical incident can be described as one that makes a significant contribution—either positively or negatively—to an activity or phenomenon
- Encourage customers to record/tell their most memorable incident(s) from the service experiences
- One-to-one interview or in-house comment cards
- Advantages:
- Facilitate the identification of specific attributes of service that have a significant impact upon customers
- Used to redesign the service delivery system around the more important customer-perceived quality attributes
- Disadvantages:
- Customers are not forced to answer –
- Customer inconvenience
Low response rate
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In CIT, Customer feedbacks can be collected during one-to-one interview or more commonly by means of in-house comment cards. Unlike guest comment card, which provide predetermined service categories, this technique encourages customers to describe one more memorable incident in detail.
Focus Group
- Invite customers to attend focus group
- Customers talk in depth & at length about the organization’s ability to meet their needs
- One person’s response may become a stimulus for another to contribute
- Advantages:
- Richness of information: Provide great specific insights on potential service improvements and ideas
- Useful in identifying service problems & their solutions from customer’s point of view
- Disadvantages:
- Expenses (guest expenses to participate in these sessions)
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Focus group is a popular approach to collect customers perceptions of service because invited customers talk in depth & at length about the organization’s ability to meet their needs. Customers share their experiences, particularly service failure experiences, and suggest better service recovery practices. Customer’s own solutions are very rewarding.
Mystery Shopping
- Purpose: Determine whether frontline staffs are displaying desired behaviors
- Mystery shopping was standard practice by the early 1940s as a way to measure employee integrity.
- Advantages:
- Gives highly actionable and in-depth insights for coaching, training, and performance evaluation
- Provide consistent & unbiased information
- Disadvantages:
- Costly
- Lack of reliability & representativeness: Since the number of mystery calls or visits is small, no individual visit or call is reliable and representative
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Service Quality Index (SQI)
- “Hard” index reflecting the findings of extensive “Soft” customer research
Goal: Entire organization work toward improving service quality for customers
- Look at service failures from the customer’s perspective
- Measure/count the occurrence of service failures that lead to customer dissatisfaction
Single Index or Composite Index
Daily Index, Monthly Index, or Yearly Index
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How to Create SQI?
1. Include all the key activities/items (service failure) that affect customer satisfaction
2. Begins from the baseline of zero failure
3. Examine the types of failure and the number that occur of each type
4. Express/count each type of service failure in absolute (raw) numbers
5. Multiple it by a weighting that highlights the seriousness of that event for customers to give a point score for each item
6. Points are then added up to generate the index
7. The lower the index, the better the performance
FedEx’s Service Quality Index
- First service company to introduce a firm-wide index of service quality
- Goal: 100% customer satisfaction & 100% service performance
- “We believe that service quality must be mathematically measured”
- Before: Percentage of on-time deliveries – internal standard that failed to reflect customer satisfaction
- SQI: 12-item measure of service quality from the customer’s viewpoint
- Weights are assigned to each item based on its relative importance in determining overall customer satisfaction
- All items are tracked daily (Daily Index) – Continuous Index can be computed
See the handout and create your SQI at your workplace. Do not forget using service failure cases.
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Customer Feedback & Service Quality
“Hospitality firms need to establish ongoing listening systems using multiple methods among different customer groups. A single service quality study is a snapshot taken at a point in time and from a particular angle. Deeper insight and more informed decision making come from a continuing series of snapshots taken from various angles and through different lenses, which form the essence of systematic listening”
(Berry & Parasuraman)
As Berry and Parasuraman stated in this slide, your individual research project assessing service quality of a hospitality entity needs multiple snapshots taken from various angles and through different lenses. Good luck!
This is the end of Ch. 3.
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