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Operations Management Essay

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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 …show more content…

Thus, the hotel should focus on people and on its customers and not only on process standardization to reduce the variability mentioned in the first point of this paper. The hotel should intensify its training and develop a customer centric culture among its employees: well trained employees, indeed, are both likely to reduce the assignable causes related to people and to better satisfy variability in customer requests. Pure back-office tasks should be standardized but the hotel should insist on creating, through training, a flexible execution paradigm for its employees. But, as we said, a satisfied customer is not always a loyal customer: in order to reinforce the relationship the hotel should implement the service warranty approach as proposed by Christopher Hart. Service warranty, indeed, “is a marketing tool service firms have increasingly been using to reduce consumer risk perceptions, signal quality, differentiate a service offering, and to institutionalize and professionalize their internal management of customer complaint and service recovery”4, increasing the chances of a returning customer. In order to measure service quality, the hotel could rely on the GAP model (Servqual-Zeithaml, Parasuman & Berry, 1990) which, classifying service quality over five dimensions (reliability, response, assurance, empathy and tangibility) and relying on qualitative questionnaires, measures customers perceived and

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