Total Quality Management in Hospitality Industry A 360 Degree Quality Assurance Approach

Abstract

The backbone of Hospitality Industry is Customer Service which cannot be denied. How best these services are rendered determines the success of the business. This study establishes the fact that there are internal and external factors that influence quality of service. These are considered as the two dimensions of the construct. The objective of this study is to investigate the influences of the undermined internal factors of service quality on customer satisfaction which are non- human such as Standards , Systems , Process , Procedures and Tools (one part of the construct Antecedents of service delivery) on service delivery. The external factors of ServQual (the other part of the construct) are well studied for its influence on customer satisfaction by many researchers. This study was conducted among 23, 4-star and 23, 5-star hotels of Chennai with 184 functional executives using non-probability and Linear Snowball sampling method with a well- structured questionnaire based on the internal factors. The result of the study focuses on the Internal factors of service quality and its role in achieving customer satisfaction. These factors will definitely help the hotel managers to improve service delivery from the grass root level. This study also tries to prove the fact that though ServQual scale is very useful, it needs to be modified and adapted for specific service segments within which it is used. The correlation of the key metrics of internal factors of service quality: standards, procedures, process, systems and tools were found to have a positive and a strong relationship to customer satisfaction (Trivago customer satisfaction score). These internal factors have to be applied individually in the hospitality perspective at various angles to study the actual performance on set standards.