Quality of Hospitality Service
QUALITY OF HOSPITALITY SERVICE
A CHALLENGE
Delivering quality service will be one of the major challenges facing hospitality managers in the opening years of the next millennium. It will be an essential condition for success in the emerging, keenly competitive, global hospitality markets. While the future importance of delivering quality hospitality service is easy to discern and to agree on, doing so presents some difficult and intriguing management issues.
Since the delivery of hospitality service always involves people, these issues center on the management of people, and in particular on the interactions between guests and staff, interactions that are called service encounters. In the eyes of our guests, our hospitality businesses will succeed or fail depending on the cumulative impact of the service encounters in which they have participated.
It is easy to check the importance of managing these service encounters. Think back to the last time you visited a hotel or restaurant. How did you feel about the quality of the experience? Was it one that you would recommend to others? What were the specific interactions that made a difference? If you can’t remember, is this something that should matter to the hospitality business concerned? Surely something should have gone especially well?
Service encounters are the building blocks of quality hospitality service. How can hospitality businesses manage them more effectively? We suggest a two step process in the evaluation of a service chain. |First, hospitality managers should identify each encounter in the chain that they wish to take apart, |
|and then single out those that are of operational or strategic significance – in effect, focusing in on |
|the few encounters that really make a difference to guest experience and thus to the bottom line. |
|Second, apply what we have called the 6 S’s to improving these critical encounters through effective |
|redesign.
A CHALLENGE
Delivering quality service will be one of the major challenges facing hospitality managers in the opening years of the next millennium. It will be an essential condition for success in the emerging, keenly competitive, global hospitality markets. While the future importance of delivering quality hospitality service is easy to discern and to agree on, doing so presents some difficult and intriguing management issues.
Since the delivery of hospitality service always involves people, these issues center on the management of people, and in particular on the interactions between guests and staff, interactions that are called service encounters. In the eyes of our guests, our hospitality businesses will succeed or fail depending on the cumulative impact of the service encounters in which they have participated.
It is easy to check the importance of managing these service encounters. Think back to the last time you visited a hotel or restaurant. How did you feel about the quality of the experience? Was it one that you would recommend to others? What were the specific interactions that made a difference? If you can’t remember, is this something that should matter to the hospitality business concerned? Surely something should have gone especially well?
Service encounters are the building blocks of quality hospitality service. How can hospitality businesses manage them more effectively? We suggest a two step process in the evaluation of a service chain. |First, hospitality managers should identify each encounter in the chain that they wish to take apart, |
|and then single out those that are of operational or strategic significance – in effect, focusing in on |
|the few encounters that really make a difference to guest experience and thus to the bottom line. |
|Second, apply what we have called the 6 S’s to improving these critical encounters through effective |
|redesign.