TLH339 Service Quality | Employee Empowerment

Introduction

QIT (Quality in tourism) has been assessing properties and driving standards across UK for over 15 years, we are experts in the field: offering advice; support & assessment for tourism & hospitality businesses. QIT is a household name in the hospitality, leisure and travel industry. QIT helps the hospitality industry in identifying the lacunae in their service quality and service management, providing them a solution, to tackle the problem and attain better customer service quality.

The case here is of canary wharf hotel, which is a 3 star hotel, based in London. The hotel has been facing a great customer lash because of its poor service quality, complaints on social media, on trip advisor, thus earning them a bad name & reputation in the hospitality industry. The hotel has been refurbished quite some time back and has great facilities and infrastructure, which is appreciated by their entire guests. An absolute poor service quality in all the departments is what is hitting them real hard. The inefficiency of the front desk to check in customers, welcoming the guests, inability of the waiters to delight customers, are some of the examples of poor customer service.

Service delivery in hotels/hospitality sector is of prime importance, no big hotel can function without having a great customer service. Services as we know of are intangible but there is tangibility in evidence of services, hence touching customer’s pain points becomes of absolute necessity (Mok, Sparks & Kadampully, 2013). Tangibility, responsiveness & reliability are what describe service quality. In the report, we will justify the importance of service quality and also adoption of various service quality management methods (Zurich, 2017). Based on the case study we will establish the current service practices and assess the impact of services on the front line team,  lastly come up with a customer feedback system that organisation can use to improve their customer service quality.

Service quality:

It can be understood as how well a service is delivered to the customer in accordance to his expectation. The service can meet, exceed or go below the client’s expectation. Hence it becomes of great importance to assess the service quality. To improve customer service, find the areas of improvement and after quick identification, finding appropriate strategy to increase customer satisfaction (Tsang, Lee & Qu, 2015). It can also be understood as the lacunae between the services demanded and the services delivered. Service quality is important in every line of business, but in case of hospitality, it is one of the highest rated factors, owing to its intangibility and the hospitality industry. It in a way helps to get a competitive advantage and gain customer’s confidence, resulting in customer loyalty and repeated business (Prentice, 2013).

Importance of service quality:

• Helps in gaining customers confidence leading to customer loyalty and lastly increased revenue(Certo, 2015)
• Good customer service help the company in gaining organic publicity and a positive Word of mouth (Bansal, Taylor, 2015)
• Good service quality helps in reducing the cost to acquire a customer (advertising cost), and helps in getting repeated business(Hussain, Naseer & Hussain, 2015)
• Helps in gaining a competitive edge over its competitors (Chang, Chen & Lan, 2013)
• Helps in building a business image.
• Gre
  
  at service quality helps in the economic growth of the company.
• The customers become promoter of the business with no additional cost.
• A great service quality becomes a key differentiator in attracting more & more clients (Murali, Muralidharan & Pugazendhi, 2016).

Hence, it is established that for the hotel to grow and serve its customers, service quality is one factor which cannot be overlooked at; it helps the business gain momentum and also give customers a value for the price they are paying.

Service quality management: It is the process of managing the quality of services delivered to the customers according to his expectation. It basically assesses how well a service is delivered to the customers, and also to identify the service gaps, act on them to further improve customer service. Hence it can be understood as monitoring and analysing the various services that are offered by an organisation to its customers, which further helps the organisation in gaining faith of the customers and helps in improving the growth of the company (Kim, Holland & Han, 2013). Since the time, significance of service quality is established; management experts have done a great deal of study to come up with appropriate methods for management to measure service quality (Lai & Hitchcock, 2016)

Methods to measure service quality:

• SERVQUAL
• Mystery shopping
• Post service rating
• Follow up survey
• In App survey
• Customer effort score
• Social media monitoring
• Documentation analysis
• Objective service metrics.

Let’s see the above mentioned models in brief to have a fair understanding of importance of these models and also understand which model or combination of models will be fit for Canary wharf.

Servqual: As the name suggests, SERVQUAL stands for service quality, it is the most widely used service management tool. It helps in understanding the subjective elements of service quality (Tovmasyan, 2017). In this, through a survey, customers are asked questions on the services delivered, in comparison to service expected. This models works on 5 quality elements which are termed as RATER.

• Reliability- Ability to deliver services as promised consistently and in an accurate manner (Roth, Mavin & Munro, 2014).
• Assurance-It is concerned with the knowledge and politeness of the employees and also their ability to convey trust and confidence in them (Ahn, Carter, Reiman & Hartzel, 2017)
• Tangibility- It is concerned with the physical appearance of the building, equipment’s, employees, website, infrastructure, etc.
• Empathy- This has to do with the mile an employee can go for a customer to deliver value and individual attention.
• Responsiveness- Willingness to help the customer and provide him with a prompt service, it is basically FCR: First call resolution( Appiah, 2016)

The elements in the RATER model does not necessarily carry equal weightage, it depends entirely on the kind of services, industry and also customer’s mind-set. But to have a great customer delivery all the elements must be taken care of as a whole. For canary wharf I would strongly suggest this model, as it is the most elaborative, and will help the hotel in identifying their areas of improvement (Von & Mun, 2014)

Mystery Shopping:  This is another incredible way of assessing the service quality. This methodology is used in retail outlets, hotels & restaurant, but works for other services as well. In this an “undercover customer” is sent to the property to assess the service on his own, he then decides on the quality of service on various parameters , including RATER,  based on his finding submits a report to the management. This is really effective knowing that the climate is neutral and provides more insights on how an employee works. This model is also essentially very useful for Canary wharf hotel (Minghetti & Celotto, 2014)

Post –service rating: This model asks the customers to rate the service as and when it is delivered. The customers can rate the services from poor, average, good, very good to delight or whatever the management has decided as the service parameters. This gives an opportunity to identify the service gap at the instant and gives an opportunity to organisation to correct its mistake (Amstad & Packer, 2015)

Follow up survey: In this methodology, customers are sent an email or a Google forms on their account. It’s a detailed survey and if done carefully provides a holistic area of improvement rather than case by case. It has its advantage, as it gives customers a good amount of time to think and then fill in the survey, but at the same time it is disadvantageous as customers don’t actually respond to such surveys and consider them as spam, also the freshness of the service goes away, hence does not provide with the relevant information which could help to improve the service quality (Moser & Kalton, 2017)

In-App survey:  Not very useful for the hotel, but can be of importance in understanding the performance and user friendliness of the hotel’s website. This app asks the customer to rate the service while on the application. Convenience and relevance are the main advantages of this type of survey (Fu, Lin, Faloutsos, Hong & Sadeh, 2013).

Customer effort score (CES): It is one of its kind methodologies, not so much in vogue, but certainly a creative way to manage service quality. In this customers are asked questions considering, how much effort they put in for getting a particular service. Lesser the customer effort score more the chances of customer to visit the place again (De, E & Wiesel, 2015).

Social Media Monitoring:  This method is in vogue since a last couple of years, owing to the growing popularity of these social platforms. These days it’s customary for every company or a brand to have a Facebook and a twitter page, the reason is all the target audience for the brand is on social, hence it becomes easy to target the customers where he is present. At the same time customers express their opinion freely on the social platform, that’s one place where they are actually heard and the company reverts to them at the earliest, as it takes few minutes for the feedback to go viral. Therefore addressing the customer concern then and there develops faith and confidence in the customer and also a brand loyalty is built, at the same time, the organic feedback helps the company in identifying its area of improvement. An extremely important method to monitor service quality, a must for the hotel (Ceyp, Scupin, 2013)

Documentation analysis: This is a qualitative method for assessing the service quality and a lengthy one, although it has some merits of its own, but the efforts put behind analysing the documents makes this method as the least used one(Rosenblatt, 2013)

Objective service metrics: This delivers the quantitative stats for the services, not enough as a whole to judge the services, but at the same time helps in identifying clear cut areas in improvement of services (Bruni, Cassia & Magno, 2017). There are a lot of metrics associated with it, naming down a few for better understanding:

• First response time
• First contact resolution ratio.
• Replies per ticket rose.
• Customer success ratio.
• Problem resolution time.
• Average waiting time

Hence, it is understood that not just one, but application of 3-4 methods can help in getting the required feedback from the customers and analysis of the same can help any organisation to improve their services. Customer was the king; he still is and will always be, therefore, listening to customers will set the things right for the organisation (Rauch, Collins, Nale & Barr, 2015). For the hotel, I would suggest a combination of SERVQUAL, Mystery shopper, Social media monitoring & Post service rating.

Service Gap Model: Another important framework, which helps in identifying the gaps between actual services and the customer’s expectation at different stages of service delivery. This model is very essential for hotel industry, it helps in identifying the stage where the customer expectation is not met and accordingly efforts can be made for customer recovery (Chin & Tsai , 2013).

Current service/ Delivery practices:

The canary wharf hotel is a 3 star property established since 2000 AD, it boasts of its location and a great infrastructure. Few years back they opened a conference and banqueting space for 3 events, which offers conferences, meeting, gala dinners & wedding services. The target audience for the hotel is leisure and business guests, the hotel has been recently been refurbished; updating the reception area, restraint and rooms. Since the refurbishment the customer booking for the hotel has increased by almost 200%, increasing revenue and profits for the hotel, at the same time the customer complaints have also increased exponentially. Hence, the hotel is earning a bad reputation on its social media page and on trip advisor. This has become big concern for the hotel management, as their service quality is seriously being jeopardised and gone below the satisfactory level. Some of the striking observation pointed out by the customer, which are worth concerning are:

• Great facilities but poor service.
• Long wait for check in
• Customer unwilling to ask the front desk employees for help, as they found them really busy.
• The hotel being understaffed as per the customers opinion
• Waiters not taking accountability and responsibility for delay in serving customers

There are certain other issues which are reflected in the case study which has quite an implication on the staff, some of them are:

• Managers not getting time to respond to customer’s feedback because of growing business.
• The staffs in themselves feel that there are not valued, get paid minimum wages, and are also understaffed.
• The hotel earlier used to have a personalization approach, that is, by calling in the name of guest after check in, such standards are not been able to follow up because of increasing business and less staff

Service quality impact:

Employee empowerment: As mentioned earlier, the staff feels extremely demotivated, as they feel that despite having a service culture, the ownership is still missing out. The staff is living under constant pressure with a feeling that they are not being cared for; it’s an extremely bad situation.  Employee can give his 100% to a company only if he is treated as an important asset. This makes them quit after joining the hotel, and thus causes problem of employee turnover. The employee attrition is creating a negative impact and an additional pressure on the working staff. Another problem is that, almost 60% of the employees are on contract or part time, this further adds  problems in service delivery. Several complaints have been made regarding the minimum wages being paid out and this further adds to employee misery. It is mentioned that the training period for the job is just 7 days, which is extremely low to train an employee. In such a case, an employee is sent on the field without proper training and thus soils customer service.

Recommendation:

• The employees has to feel special for the work he has been doing, it is the ownership of the HR department to come up with new ways of team activity, sessions on motivation and also some kind of incentive structure for the work being done by the employees.
• The training period has to be increased to at least 14 days , and it should be a combination of both On the job training and classroom training on importance of service quality, and its implication on employee’s appraisal and performance (Dhar, 2015)
• Any concern , with minimum wages have to be dealt seriously and on a urgent basis, finding a problem in the wage , it has to be corrected, or if it’s just a grape wine, management has to come out in the open and clear it to the employees.
• The employees has to be well taught of the importance of keeping service quality, taking ownership of their jobs, importance of a customer feedback, treating the customer above all and treating him right, taking accountability and responsibility of the customer and do everything possible in his/her capacity to get a customer delight, all this practices, when quantified with incentive, the employee is sure to give his 100% in the job and make his personal duty to keep the customer happy.

Service quality culture:

 The service quality culture in hospitality has to be top notch, in any case. The service quality culture says that the name of the guest has to be used once they get to know it, and then by calling in the guest 15 minutes after he checks in, this is a brilliant service culture which canary wharf was following  , it earned them a lot of praise in the past. But due to increase in business, they are not able to keep up with their standards and hence in the process, are losing on to the customer touch they have been giving earlier and also the valuable feedback. Moreover, the hotel management is not able to respond to customer’s feedback, and delay in response or no response makes them feel dejected and in the process they end up losing the customer and earning a bad reputation for themselves.

Recommendation:

• A separate department has to be built within the hotel, for customer feedback, recording their responses, revert to their complaints, do a social media monitoring on a daily basis and formulate a response time of 15-20 minutes, for every complain/concern they have been receiving, only then the customer will feel like he is heard and taken care of, it will also take unnecessary responsibility from managers head, who are busy driving business into the hotel.
• Creation of customer success managers will be a great practice towards ensuring maintenance of service quality in the entire department.
• These managers primary duty will be to survey the hotel, meet and great every customer in the lobby, restraint, pool, gym and try and make them feel special by using their names or by simply asking, how I may assist you. This will go down really well with the customers and the chances of customer retention will increase manifold.

Understaffing/Recruitment Practices:

 It has been said over and over that canary wharf is facing abundant understaffing issues. Almost 60% of their service failures can be attributed to understaffing and hiring of contractual & part time employees. This seriously impacts services being delivered to customers, as without an assured job, the employees stay away from putting in much of the efforts to keep their customers happy. They just do their basic job and shy away from travelling few extra miles for them. Also as the training period being of just 7 days, it leaves an employee unprepared to do his duty, and thus resulting into service failure.

Recommendation:

• The HR should hire employees for a permanent job , rather than getting part time employees, this will inculcate a sense of ownership among the employees and they can at the same time be hold accountable for any service failures if need be.
• The training has to be a combination of customer centricity & job orientation. His importance of services in hospitality has to be fed to the employees in great depth and their performance should be evaluated on a monthly basis with valuable feedback on service failures and areas of improvement in their services.
• It is established that the hotel is increasing its profit and earning great revenues, I don’t see it as a concern if hiring more people could be a difficulty, hiring would be able to solve a lot of problems for canary wharf

Customer Feedback System:

As discussed earlier in the report, customer feedback builds the base of company’s service quality improvement. On the basis of customers view, comment, feedback, suggestions the management sits down and devise a plan to overcome the pain points experienced by the customers (Chadha, 2015). It becomes essential for the management to take down the concern of the customers in a positive manner and work on them; this in turn would help them improving their service quality, and when the customer visits again, he would be delighted to see his feedback was worth enough to be listened to. In the context of canary wharf hotel, will be putting some question which will help the hotel in getting interesting insight regarding the service quality of the hotel and would give them enough room for improvement.

• Comment cards:  Amongst different other methods to gain customer insight. Comment cards is one of the most important way of getting insight from the customer experience when its fresh in the customer’s mind(Simmers & Keith, 2015)

Putting a rough comment card for canary wharf hotel:

Online feedback: This is one of the most prevalent form of feedback used by hospitality industry across the globe, it is very beneficial in the way, the feedback gets stores on the cloud or on the databases of the company and its really comfortable for the management to have a look at the same anytime they want, easy to access, etc. (GU & Ye, 2014)

A rough online feedback for canary wharf hotel can be sketched as:

We truly value your stay at canary wharf; we in our hearts really hope that your stay was comforting and pleasant for you.

We also understand that the image of hotel is completely in your hands and so we are fully committed to hear your feedback and work upon it.

We would be extremely grateful to you, if you can spare us 5 mines and help us in filing out this survey, we would really love to hear from you and work on the feedback given by you in order to serve you best in the future and make an everlasting relationship with you.

Thanks you very much in advance for the feedback and in all our hearts, hope to see you soon:

1. Please rate your experience of checking in

2. How was your room

Did you use the internet:

3. How was the internet

4. Which of the following services did you use ( You can choose multiple boxes)
   • Gym
   • Spa
   • Concierge
   • Pool
   • Business centre
   • Tennis court
   • None of these
5. When our serviced you today, did they:

Name of the employee who serviced you and the department:

6. In what ways did we perform exceptionally well:  100 words to answer
7. How may we improve ourselves to become your “preferred hotel” to stay.

Customer Interview/Focus group: This is one of the most detailed form of feedback which can be collected from a client. It is lengthy and requires a longer time in comparison to other methods. This usually is conducted one on one and gives an in depth insight on the services. Focus group on the other hand is a small group of people brought together with a moderator to focus on a specific topic, rather than too many topics. The topic in itself has any questions, which is why the moderator is required to carefully take the group through the entire question for the topic. This method has a lot of pros and cons of its own (Dev & Kumar, 2016).

Pros:

• Follow up questions are really important and this is the only way to ask them.
• Interviews are unstructured, randomness defines them
• Focus groups also allow people to have a conversation with each other, hence better brainstorming sessions.

Cons:

• Time consuming
• Lots of logistics
• Interviewees may not be part of the target audience.
• The hypothesis might be proven wrong.

Some questions for Personnel interview can be:

1. What do you think was the high point and low point of the staff you dealt with.
2. How was your room, discuss in terms of size, facilities, room service.
3. What kind of services provided by the hotel were useful to you and why
4. Can you describe your overall check in and check out process.
5. How was the quality of food served to you and the response time of the waiters.
6. Is there anything that went terribly wrong with our services, what, and how you think we can improve on the same.
7. If needed, would you be a promoter for our hotel, why and why not.

Topic for focus group can be:

• What defines services in hotel –Staff, amenities, infrastructure
• What can be done to fasten the check in and check out process for the hotel

Conclusion:

The extensive report here clearly shows the importance of having a service culture for the hotel, the underlying problems of understaffing; no ownership for the job, management busy with the incoming business to the extent of avoiding customer’s complaints or addressing their concerns, are some of the causes of grave concerns. With the help of recommendation suggested to the hotel management, to hire more employees, work on the training of the employee on subject of growing importance of service in the hospitality industry, will improve the condition of hotel and will certainly bring down the customer complaints. At the same time using a detailed and an ad hoc method of customer feedback system will help them understand customer’s pain point.  Improving on the grey areas will surely lead to customer loyalty and retention, which in turn will help the hotel in getting more revenue. The importance of service quality can be simply understood by saying that, if a hotel has to survive it has to start listening to its customers seriously and act upon their feedback (Dabholkar, 2015).

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