The Five Gaps Of Customer Service In The Hospitality Industry

The author knows that a business will not succeed if the employees do not give the customers a quality customer service. Customers are most likely to come back to a place where they feel welcome, where they feel like they are being well treated.

Customers’ perception of service depends on their service encounters. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a series of personal service encounters that were conducted over a one-month period of time. Service encounters are commonly known as situations in which the customer receives value through direct interaction with a firm (Zeithaml, Bitner, & Gremler, 2013). The encounters can be private, cloistered, mechanically facilitated, and/or face-to-face (Zeithaml, Bitner, & Gremler, 2013). The service encounters to be discussed will be broken into two categories, positive and negative encounters, and construe notable themes found within each category. In conclusion the paper will summarize the information presented including my lessons

Hospitality Management is a difficult and competitive market, and any lack in customer service can result in defecting customers or the termination of a relationship between a customer and a service provider. In this paper we will look at Hilton a company that has continually ranked amongst the top ranking hotels and continues to improve. Hilton’s customer service ranks as one of the top hospitality providers in the United States. We will look at the history of how Hilton came to be the name brand it is today and some of their process the used to narrow the customer service gaps such as Hilton Honors, the Hiltons Reservation Customer Care, and RESMAX. We will look at how they look at how Hilton manages the customer expectations through the use of employee training and their decreased the customer service gap through employee retention. We will also look as how Hilton co-partnered with Citibank in order to offer its Hilton Honors member additional benefits in order to keep in line with the customer service that the customers have come to expect.

The research tries to show evidences on how customer service can affect the restaurant business and achieving the goals in the food industry.

These findings specify an optimistic relation between hospitality, guest fulfilment, and the hotel servicescape, the second of which is the mediator working here. This supports the positive relations between hospitality and guest fulfilment. In today’s highly modest hospitality business, the communication between customer service and attractive service atmosphere will increase the level of guest fulfilment significantly. The relation between the perceptible as well as the imperceptible elements of service contributions will positively make the service skill more pleasurable and impressive for the guests. According to the author apart from the consequence superiority, customers assess the service excellence based on interface quality the procedure by which the service product is transported as well as physical atmosphere excellence, which is the quality of the physical atmospheres where the service is transported. Hospitality introducing behaviour is

However, there are some limitations that the organization has because it only focuses on satisfying its employees and providing good work condition to them. According to the reviews of Consumeraffairs.com, consumers who visited Hilton Hotels & Resorts had bad experience and did not satisfy about services that they received from its employees. To solve the problems, therefore, Hilton Worldwide needs to find ways to develop service quality that offers to its customers. Having good service programs and giving satisfaction to customers are significant as much as having good quality human resources. If services in the hospitality organizations were not good enough, people would not go back and the company will fail in next few years. Therefore, Hilton Worldwide should develop the quality of its services to keep and attract its

The customer gap is defined as the difference between the customer’s expectations of the service and the customer’s perceptions of the service, when the difference is negative it results in customer dissatisfaction (REFERNECE). Customer expectations are standards that customers bring into the service experience that they use as reference points to judge the performance of the service (REFERENCE), whereas customer perceptions are subjective assessments based upon the customer’s actual experience of the service (REFERNCE). The type of service encounters the customer experiences can affectively widen or narrow the customer gap (REFRENCE).

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

Services are one of the factors in customer loyalty studies because of the consistent and high standards of service that provided by the hotel. The delivery of service as promised was identified as the factor, which is the most important in developing loyalty to the hotel. In contrast, employees of the hotel should ensure the quality of hotel services by constantly reviewing their guest’s needs and the management should provide service from time to time in order to improve staffs performance. The third elements which is internal marketing is also crucial to the quality of hotel services. Treating the employees as internal customers would increase the employees’ satisfaction which is fundamental to the provision of good service to the hotel customers.

The purpose of this essay is to discuss how established models and theories can be implemented by management in the travel and tourism industry to develop a successful customer service strategies which in turn influence loyalty behaviour. The creation of loyal customers is the key to the growth of any business and the way to satisfy customers. It also explains the best practice for resolving potential conflict situations to maintain quality customer relationship and effective selling. Quality customer service is an asset to the growth of a company. Quality customer service is more than offering a smile, a handshake, and “have a nice day.” It is an interaction between customer and provider in which the performance of the provider meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations. The provider’s attitude and performance shape customers’ perceptions” (Spicuzza, 1992, p. 50). This essay will talk about the customer satisfaction and standards such as product knowledge and professionalism and the skills vital to a tourism workplace.

Business and customer service interaction have played a huge part in the great world we live in today. The opportunity for success in business wouldn’t be available if companies did not recognize the importance of treating customers’ right. Customer’s do not purchase from or support companies who do not deliver good service. There are many factors that can provoke poor Customer Satisfaction. The evolution of

Service is the most important aspect when it comes to handling a hotel. A hotel’s main objective is to provide the best service and tend to all of the guests’ needs and requirements. If there is no service then there would be no business. When running a business, the costumer is always placed first. Poor services can results in a complaint from a guest. But that complaint can be used to better the business in the future.

According to the definition of the expectation, in order to understand the need and wants of customer, combination of research and market experience is necessary. There are number of exogenous factors including their previous services experience and expectation of the brand which provide cues about the level of service. This is what being referred as customer expectation. Moreover, in order to understand the expectation of guests, the complex issues because of service transaction which is known as moment of truth, are social acts between individual employees and guests (NORMAN, 1991). This is considered as management perception service quality gap. In addition service quality is linked with expectation. If the employees have been asked to fulfill the expectation of the customer by providing them with the quality of service, unfortunately with the lack of training skills in their staff management and they are unable to interpret because of the complex guidelines. This is the reason of the bad quality of service. Customer satisfaction is co-related to customer expectation, perception and service quality because it is the responsibility of the employee to reduce the stress of the customer. If they will not do so then they will have to face the problem with the bad reviews towards their hotel, restaurants, motels, etc. If they create a pleasant experience of their customers by satisfying them with overall feeling of contentment with a interaction by solving their

This paper delves into the realm of customer complaints in the Hospitality Industry. Issues that relate to customer complaints in general, complaining as a process, the impact of customer complaints, the most common complaints in the Hospitality Industry, hotel brands with the highest rate of complaints, and handling guest complaints are discussed.

A Project Report Submitted to the SIVA SIVANI INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT Partial fulfillment of the requirements of PGDM