Service Quality Design & Management

• Overview of the module and its objectives.
• Introduction of the Instructor(s) and Student(s).

With this module you should understand:

• Important differences between making products and servinggu ests.
• The importance of meeting the hospitality guest’s expectations.
• The importance of the guest experience.
• The components of the guest experience.
• The definition of service quality and service value in the hospitality field.
• The reasons why “it all starts with the guest.”

Who are you?

Online Interactive Case Study (Airline)

With this module you should understand:

• The three generic strategies for positioning products and services.
• The organizational planning cycle and how its different elements result in the establishment of the hospitality organization’s overall strategic plan and service strategy.
• The basics of how organizations plan and design the guest experience.
• The key external and internal factors that must be examined for successful planning.
• The quantitative and qualitative tools used for forecasting in the hospitality environment—external and internal.
• The process to determine core competencies.
• The importance of including the key drivers of guest satisfaction in the planning process.
• The importance and value of product and service branding.
• A planning model, showing how components are tied together and action plans are developed

HOSPITALITY PRINCIPLE: FOCUS STRATEGY ON THE KEY DRIVERS OF GUEST SATISFACTION

With this module you should understand:

• Why the service setting or service environment is important.
• How the service environment affects guests and employees.
• Which elements of the service environment need to be managed.
• How service environment factors moderate or affect the responses of guests, according to the Bitner model.
• Why providing a service environment in which guests feel safe and secure is critical.
• How theming the service setting pays off.

With this module you should understand:

• Why a hospitality organization’s culture is so important to service success.
• Why the organization’s leaders are so important to defining, developing, teaching, and maintaining its culture.
• What essential roles the organization’s beliefs, values, and norms play.
• How the organization communicates its culture to its employees—through laws, language, stories, legends, heroes, symbols, and rituals.
• How the organization can accomplish the difficult task of changing its culture, if that becomes necessary.
• What research reveals about organizational cultures.

With this module you should understand:

• The process of recruiting employees who will give excellent guest service.
• Internal and external recruitment strategies that organizations use.
• Standard approaches and techniques for screening and interviewing job candidates.
• Employee skills, traits, and general abilities that have been found to lead to guest service excellence.
• The importance of a strong service orientation for all organizational employees, not just those on the frontline serving guests.
• The importance of a diversified workforce to hospitality organizations.

With this module you should understand:

• The importance of training and development to hospitality organizations.
• The principles and methods used by hospitality organizations to train and develop their employees.
• Methods used by hospitality organizations to measure the effectiveness of training.

With this module you should understand:

• How hospitality organizations motivate their employees to provide outstanding guest service.
• How organizations reinforce and reward guest-centered employees.
• How outstanding hospitality organizations fulfill employee needs.
• How playing roles can improve guest service.
• How modern hospitality organizations enhance guest service by empowering employees.
• How leadership and authority work in organizations and why employees accept authority.

With this module you should understand:

• How, when, and why hospitality organizations encourage or empower guests to help provide their own guest experiences.
• Which strategies most effectively involve the guest in co-creating the experience.
• What the advantages and disadvantages of guest involvement are for the organization and guest.
• Why hospitality organizations must sometimes “fire the guest” and how to do it.

With this module you should understand:

• The importance and uses of information to hospitality organizations.
• Ways in which information enhances the service product, setting, and delivery system.
• The sophisticated information systems that hospitality organizations are now using and their advantages and disadvantages.
• The impact of the Internet on communication with customers and employees.
• The hospitality organization itself as a large informationprocessing system.

With this module you should understand:

• How to plan, design, analyze, and check the hospitality organization’s service delivery system.
• How to design a delivery system using several methods, such as flow-charting, blueprinting, the universal service map, and PERT/CPM.
• How to use fishbone analysis, poka-yokes, and other methods to locate the source of problems and prevent their occurrence or reoccurrence.
• How to use a cross-functional organizational design to deliver a service product.

With this module you should understand:

• How to plan and manage the wait.
• How to make any wait for service as short and pleasant as possible.
• How to make any wait for service seem short and pleasant.
• How to plan for capacity shortages.
• How to manage the guest’s perception of the wait.
• How to offset the wait’s negative effects by managing the value of the experience provided to the guest.
• How to use queuing theory to plan the wait.
• How to simulate a wait.

With this module you should understand:

• How to measure the effectiveness of service delivery and of the overall guest experience.
• How to use methods of measuring service effectiveness, including service standards, process strategies, managerial observation, and employee assessment.
• How to acquire guest opinions of service effectiveness using comment cards, surveys (mail, Web, and phone), focus groups, and mystery shoppers.
• How to determine the costs and benefits of the different methods for acquiring guest opinions.
• How to use service guarantees.
• How to achieve continuous improvement in the experience provided to guests.

With this module you should understand:

• How guests respond when the guest experience fails to meet their expectations.
• How organizations should respond when the experience fails to meet guest expectations.
• Why fixing service failures quickly—on the spot, if possible—is so important.
• Why positive word of mouth is so valuable and bad word of mouth so harmful.
• Why the recovery method for handling a service failure is so important.
• How to learn from service failures.
• How guests evaluate the hospitality organization’s recovery efforts.
• How to match the recovery strategy to the failure.

With this module you should understand:

• The overarching framework of the three Ss—strategy, staffing, and systems.
• The difference between competing on service and competing on price.
• Why great future business leaders must also be guestologists.
• The challenges leaders of service firms will face in the future.
• The importance of innovation and managing change.
• The key factors for service leadership.
• The reasons why “it all ends with the guest.”