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C H A P T E R 12

Measuring and Managing

Service Delivery
HOSPITALITY PRINCIPLE: PURSUE PERFECTION RELENTLESSLY

Chapter

Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction—and I mean that they are excited about what you are doing—
you have to improve.
—Horst Schulze, Former President, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.

Good isn’t good enough.

—Len Berry, Service Marketing Author and Scholar

Success is never final.

—J. Willard Marriott Jr., Chairman & CEO, Marriott International, Inc.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should understand: • How to determine the costs and benefits of the different
methods for acquiring guest opinions.
• How to measure the effectiveness of service delivery and of the
overall guest experience. • How to use service guarantees.
• How to use methods of measuring service effectiveness, • How to achieve continuous improvement in the experience
including service standards, process strategies, managerial provided to guests.
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.

401
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402 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

process strategies job performance standards comment cards

management by walking around service guarantee SERVQUAL
(MBWA) structured guest interviews mystery shoppers
guest focus groups

The service has been planned, and the guests have arrived. Now you must deliver the
expected service experience. You hope to provide great service, but how will you know
wheather you are succeeding? Accurately measuring what guests think about their hotel
stay, restaurant meal, or some other service experience is a difficult challenge for
hospitality organizations striving to achieve service excellence. Nevertheless, it must be
done. All hospitality organizations face rising guest expectations and an increasing guest
unwillingness to settle for less than they think they paid for. This new customer activism
has made service quality more important than ever as managers strive to meet both
heightened customer expectations and increasing competition.
This chapter focuses on finding out how the guest perceives the quality of the guest
experience so that the hospitality manager can see, from the guest’s perspective, where
there are any problems. The critical challenge for hospitality managers seeking this
information is to identify and implement the methods that best measure the quality of the
experience from the guest’s point of view as the experience is occurring. Measurements taken
after the experience may be too late to enable recovery from failure, though they may be
useful in improving the service experience for the future.
As we have stated throughout this text, the guest determines the quality and value of
the service experience. Consequently, an acceptable experience for one guest might be a
wow experience for another and totally unacceptable to a third. The subjective nature of
the quality and value of a guest experience makes identifying and implementing the
appropriate measurements particularly difficult.
One key to creating a flawless guest experience is that the organization must know what
errors are being made, what failures are occurring. If you don’t know it’s broken, you can
hardly fix it. Consequently, monitoring and measuring the quality of the guest experience
with an eye out for flaws or failures is a crucial part of the hospitality organization’s
responsibility. Satisfied guests come back, and dissatisfied guests go elsewhere.
The best time to find out about possible service failures is before the guest ever arrives.
The best mistake is one that never happens because the organization planned thoroughly to
ensure that each part of the experience is flawless. But no matter how well the management
planned the meal, scheduled the convention, or designed the hotel lobby, mistakes will
happen. The organization wants to have measures in place to identify the mistakes as soon
as possible—certainly before the guest leaves the service setting, while the information is still
fresh in the guest’s mind. Finding out about failure on the spot gives the organization the
opportunity to recover. The worst time to learn of a service failure is after the guest has
departed because the opportunity to fix it is substantially decreased once the guest has left
the premises.
As we have discussed in prior chapters on planning the service experience with
blueprinting, fishbone analysis, waiting-line simulations and other techniques, the most
effective tool for ensuring quality is through planning to ensure that anything that might go

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Chapter 12 Measuring and Managing Service Delivery 403

wrong is anticipated and failsafed to the extent humanly possible. In this chapter we look at
techniques for assessing and monitoring how successful this planning has been. Since
achieving perfection in hospitality experiences is impossible no matter how thoroughly you
plan, we will discuss the art and science of finding and fixing service failures in Chapter 13.

TECHNIQUES AND METHODS FOR

ASSESSING SERVICE QUALITY
Process Strategies
Process strategies include various ways in which organizations can avoid failing their
guests by monitoring the delivery while it is taking place, while it is in process. A process
strategy is a means of comparing what is happening against what is supposed to happen,
usually, but not always, expressed as a measurable service standard. Sometimes process
strategies are the experience and training that managers and employees have in delivering
the high-quality service experience that organizations want their customers to have. The
idea behind process strategies is to design monitoring mechanisms into the delivery
system to find and fix failures before they affect the quality of the guest experience. A
supervisor can monitor telephone calls, a server can check the food order against what is
served, or a machine can control the frying time of french fries to get them perfect every
time. The advantage of process strategies is that they can catch errors before or as they
occur, enabling prevention or immediate correction before the errors impact guest satis-
faction beyond repair. Of course, organizations need to devote the resources to create
and maintain the error-prevention system, and that has costs.
Hard Rock Cafe, for example, hires an additional person to stand at the end of the
food preparation line to match the order against the food on the plate to be served, to
catch discrepancies before the guest ever sees the order. Even though the traditional job
description for wait staff includes this checking responsibility, the additional person re-
duces the possibility of error even further. The Opryland Hotel in Nashville cross-trains
some of its employees in front-desk service so that they can be called upon in peak de-
mand times when the front desk is extra busy. If line lengths threaten to exceed the ser-
vice standard, this “swat team” staffs extra positions at the front desk to reduce the wait
for the incoming or departing guests.
Service standards that can be applied while the service is in process provide employees
with objective measures against which to monitor their own job performance while they
are doing it. Specifying the maximum number of times the phone can ring before it is
picked up is an example. Other process-related measurements that allow the organization
to minimize errors or catch them while the guest experience is underway include the
number of times a server should revisit a table during the meal, or the number of people
who can stand in line before the manager adds extra personnel to the check-in.

Rusty Pelican Standards

Restaurants know that guests value prompt service. Figure 12-1 shows an example of
some of the service standards from the Rusty Pelican Restaurant. Although the full docu-
ment is nine pages long, Figure 12-1 shows the portion describing how the server should
“approach the table and seat the guests.” Because the servers themselves determined the
standards, they were eager to monitor their own performance and try to meet or surpass
the standards. Several benefits resulted. Service quality improved; increased server pro-
ductivity meant that fewer servers were needed, which increased the tip income of servers;

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
404 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

The Rusty Pelican res-

taurant has created ex-
plicit service standards
both to inform servers of
the quality of service ex-
pected from them and to
motivate better service
as servers try to beat the
standards. The figure on
the following page

Photo by John Meyer. Used with permission by the Rusty Pelican.

shows just one of nine
pages of standards for
the restaurant.

customers (to management’s surprise) were willing to pay more to receive better service,
and servers identified a couple of bottlenecks—potential failure points—that interfered with
prompt, reliable service. Smoothing out those points improved service quality even more.1
Continually checking the performance of organizational members against preestab-
lished service standards while the service experience is in process is an excellent way to
ensure a successful experience. Two other in-process methods of assessing the service
quality of the experience while it is happening are managerial observation, sometimes
called management by walking around (MBWA), and employee observation and in-
quiry. If managers or employees ask a guest “how is it?” or see someone unhappy, they
might be able to identify and fix a service failure immediately. Some standards of perfor-
mance are embodied in organizational service guarantees, so organizations will want to
keep the terms of these guarantees in mind while providing service. After providing the
service experience to the guests but before they have left the premises, the organization
may want to solicit their opinions about whether their expectations have been met.
The methods designed to assess quality while service is being provided are intended to
ensure the success of individual service experiences. Also important for long-run organiza-
tional success is having methods in place for collecting data directly from guests after their
experience, to identify the areas needing improvement to satisfy regular guests and attract
new ones. Among these methods are comment cards; toll-free 800 numbers; e-mail, tele-
phone, and Web surveys using various techniques; and guest focus groups. Mystery
shopping is an additional widely used approach for gathering data about the quality of a
service experience.

F I G U R E 1 2 - 1 The Service Standards at the Rusty Pelican

Used with permission by the Rusty Pelican

Approach the table and seat the guests:

1. Server will approach the table and greet guests by name within one (1) minute.
Immediately after the guest is seated:
“Good evening Mr. or Mrs. Jones, welcome to the Rusty Pelican”. Do not
memorize greeting for all tables. Use creativity, vary wording to guests. Do not
slouch, but stand up straight. Smile. Hold your tray at the side and not in front
of you.
If guests appear to be rushed, find out what time they must leave and make a
notation on top of the check. For guests in a hurry or at lunch, you will discuss the
menu and attempt to take order immediately during the greeting. Suggest faster
service items.
Suggest and sell a specific cocktail, appetizer. Use a head nod when making
suggestions.
2. Suggest a cocktail to all guests at the table. “May I bring you a Fresh-Lime Marga-
rita with Cuervo Gold and Grand Marnier, a glass or perhaps a bottle of Kendall
Jackson Chardonnay?
For non drinkers suggest “Mocktails” (virgin drinks such as virgin strawberry
margaritas). Suggest bottled water. “May I bring you some water?” If response is
yes...”we serve Pelligrino, Evian and Perrier. Which would you prefer?” If exotic
drinks are not requested, then you may suggest juice, soft drinks, iced tea or
coffee.
Create a “Drink Special for a Day”. Tell your guests about the ingredients. Re-
member to garnish all drinks as specified in the Mr. Boston liquor guide. If your
guest would like a cocktail, UPSELL. If he/she orders a scotch on the rocks, ask
them “Would you prefer Johnnie Walker Black or Chivas Regal?” Always give two
choices.
REMEMBER: Repeat back the order as the guest orders.
3. Suggest an Appetizer:
“and how about a delicious made with mouth watering and a
tangy sauce, or my favorite to begin your dinner? Encourage guests to
share an appetizer!!!
Use buzz words to entice and describe food and beverages. See attached list of
buzz words.
At lunch, for the benefit of the guest, the total order should be taken at this
time, IF GUEST DESIRES.

The various methods differ in cost, accuracy, degree of guest inconvenience, and at what
point in the guest experience they are used. Measuring service quality can have many orga-
nizational benefits, but as usual, the benefits must be balanced against the costs of obtaining
them. The organization must balance the information needed and the research expertise re-
quired to gather and interpret the information against the available funds. As a rule, the
more accurate and precise the data, the more expensive it is to acquire.

Measures of Service Quality

Managers of outstanding hospitality organizations try to develop measures for every part
of the guest experience so that they can monitor where they are meeting or failing to
meet their own definition of quality service. These measures are critical to ensure that

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
406 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

the service is delivered to the customer as it should be. According to Phil Crosby in Qual-
ity Is Free, the price of not conforming to a quality standard can be calculated. That price
is how much it costs to fix errors and failures that result from not meeting the quality
standard in the first place. Although some may think that determining the cost of not an-
swering phone calls within three rings is impossible, quality experts such as Crosby think
it can and should be done.2
Some standards are built directly into the design of the service system. For example, a
restaurant bar is designed to contain sufficient beer capacity and wine storage space to
meet forecasted demand. Some standards are for employee use in anticipating guests
coming in the door. To use the restaurant again as an example, if the restaurant has reli-
able predictions of how many customers come in on the different days of the week, those
predictions can be used as a basis or standard for the number of salads that should be pre-
prepared, the number of tables that should be pre-set, and the amount of silverware that
should be rolled into napkins. If the prediction is correct and the standards for these as-
pects of the service are met, a service failure should not occur. A final group of standards
is used after the guests have arrived and while the service is taking place, such as maxi-
mum number of minutes before greeting and number of visits to the table during the
meal. Poka-yokes such as those described in Chapter 10 can be used to prevent failures
in some of these activities.
Other examples of how performance standards can prevent failures might include an-
nual hours of training required of service personnel, number of computer terminals to be
purchased to serve anticipated demand, and number of banquet tables to be set up or
other facilities to be available when the organization can reasonably predict requirements
before the service experience ever begins.
Table 12-1 provides a summary of the methods and techniques available to hospitality
organizations for monitoring and assessing the quality of the service experience while it is
being delivered. They all depend on careful planning to set service standards, careful
training to prepare the employees to meet those standards, and rewards for employees
when the guest experience meets or exceeds the set standards.

Use Many Measures or Just One Super Measure?

Most hospitality organizations measure quality by developing and using standards in as
many ways as they can. British Airways, for example, tracks some 350 indicators of qual-
ity, ranging from on-time performance, to aircraft cleanliness, to how much time to check
in on a flight. It issues a monthly report on its key performance indicators to all of its
managers, who can use these internally generated indicators in conjunction with the exter-
nal customer surveys to assess the quality level of their airline.3
Others argue that a “super measure” capturing the most important factor in the expe-
rience is a better managerial strategy as it focuses everyone on that one important thing.
At the other extreme from British Airways, Continental Airlines, now part of United
Airlines, returned to profitability in the mid-1990s by using just one of the BA quality
indicators—on-time performance—as a single super measure: Be On Time. For every
month that the airline was in the top three of Department of Transportation monthly
rankings of on-time flight arrivals, all Continental employees received a bonus. The airline
extended the on-time concept throughout its system; everything—from baggage handling
to aircraft cleanup—had to be on time. By 2000 Continental had become not only num-
ber one in on-time flight arrivals but was also rated number one in customer satisfaction
by J.D. Power.4

TAB LE 12 -1 Tech niq ues f or As sessin g Quality Du r i n g t h e S e r v i c e Ex p e r i e n c e

TE C HN IQ UE A DV A NT AG ES D IS AD VA NT A GES
Job performance • Translate service standards into behaviors that • Can’t cover all aspects of every service
standards can be measured encounter
• Provide objective criteria for rewarding • May discourage innovative solutions to
employees for doing what the standards customer requests falling outside service
require standards and prescribed behaviors
• Allow easy monitoring by supervisors and
self-monitoring by employees of what they
should be doing

Managerial • Management knows business, policies, • Management presence may influence service
observation procedures, and service standards providers
(MBWA) • No technology or up-front costs required • Lacks statistical validity and reliability
• No inconvenience to customers • Objective observation requires specialized
• Opportunity to recover from service failure training
• Opportunity to collect direct, specific guest • Management may not know enough about
feedback situation to gather all the facts
• Opportunity to identify service problems • Takes management time away from other
• Opportunity for immediate coaching or duties
reinforcing of service-providing employees

Employee • Employees have first-hand knowledge of • Objective observation requires specialized

observation service delivery system obstacles training
• Customers volunteer service-quality feedback • Employees disinclined to report problems they
to service-providing employees created
• No inconvenience to customers • Lacks statistical validity and reliability
• Opportunity to find and fix service failures • Employee trust of management will influence
immediately what feedback is shared
• Employee empowerment improves morale • Organizational system for collecting/analyzing
• Opportunity to collect detailed guest feedback customer feedback is required
• Minimal cost for data gathering and
documentation

Service • Allow customers to see service standards and • Employees may try to avoid mentioning them
guarantees monitor them or honoring them when invoked
• Send employees strong message about organi- • Guarantee may not be written in a way that is
zational commitment to service quality consistent with the actual service product and
• Document service failures may not be taken seriously
• Enhance likelihood of guest complaining to • Managers may hide guarantee policy to avoid
allow fixing service failures negative performance implications

Structured guest • Opportunity to collect detailed guest feedback • Require a significant investment in training
interviews • Ability to gather representative and valid and time
sample of targeted customers • May not be a representative sample of guests
• Opportunity to recover from service failure • Difficult and expensive to collect a large sample
• Suggest that company is interested in customer of respondents
opinions of service quality • Recollection of specific service experience
details may be lost
• Memory of other service experiences may bias
responses
• Respondents tend to give socially desirable
responses
• Inconvenience makes incentives for partici-
pants necessary
Adapted from Robert C. Ford and Susan Bach, 1997. Measuring Service Quality: Tools for Gaining the Competitive Advantage. FIU Hospitality Review 15(1):86-87. Reprinted with permission.

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
408 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Planning as described in Chapter 10 establishes a range of standards before and during

the entire experience. If the standards are met, the experience should happen as it is sup-
posed to happen. Now we need techniques and methods to assess how those plans work
out in practice.

Service Standards
As discussed in Chapter 10, part of the process of planning a service delivery system is to
develop service standards: the organization’s expectations for how the different aspects of
the service experience should be delivered every time to every guest. In a lot of ways, ser-
vice standards in services organizations are the equivalent to quality-control standards in
manufacturing organizations, except that no QC inspector can use calipers to measure
the aspects of the service experience. Instead, service organizations try to invent surrogate
measurement tools, such as service standards, to measure the essentially immeasurable
service experience as it is being produced. The hope is that using such standards will en-
able catching and fixing bad experiences in a way similar to that in which the QC inspec-
tor catches and tosses bad ball bearings.

Job Performance Standards

The organization can help to ensure success by setting specific job performance stan-
dards. These standards for specific jobs, derived from the service standards, provide em-
ployees with clear and specific performance expectations for each major duty associated
with their jobs. When guests are seated in a restaurant, they expect someone to attend to
them within a reasonable time. Emeril Lagasse, famed chef, restaurateur, and television
personality, tells how he implements his service standard that waiters must take a cocktail
order within fifteen seconds of the guest being seated. Salt and pepper shakers are used to
signal whether the standard has been met. The shakers are usually together. The person
seating the guest subtly separates them, meaning that the drink order has not yet been
taken. When servers take drink orders, they subtly put the shakers back together. This
simple cue lets everyone see whether the standard has been met.5 One additional benefit
of setting and monitoring standards is that they can encourage employees who seek to
meet or beat the standards to develop innovative solutions. Some servers create partner-
ships with other servers to cover for them when delays keep them from meeting a stan-
dard. If they are busy taking an order at a table, the partner will make the initial greeting
for them to beat the standard.
On the other hand, the potential benefits of job performance standards may not be re-
alized, and in fact may even become a disadvantage, if the performance standards are not
carefully set. If standards are too limiting, employees may be reluctant to deviate from
them if guests make unanticipated requests. Nonetheless, the potential benefits of well-
designed standards can far outweigh the disadvantages. Performance standards make
supervision easier (the manager can see if the employee is performing according to stan-
dards) and also facilitate self-management by employees (employees can see in clear terms
what the organization’s performance expectations are).
To help assess how well job performance standards are being met, employee perfor-
mance can be monitored, by managers observing performance or by using technology such
as a device that monitors how many rings it takes to answer each call, or by the employees
self-monitoring their performance. One of the big challenges for managers here is to ensure
that their employees do not feel they will be punished for reporting failures to meet stan-
dards because of something they did. While it’s easy to report a failure someone else or
the delivery system made, most people find it hard to report service failures they made.

Managers must make it clear to employees that doing what they can to fix service failures is
their first responsibility and that not telling someone who can fix a problem they caused will
get them in more trouble than reporting their mistakes.
The keys to the use of job performance standards are that (1) the standards must be
clear and relevant to the service being delivered, (2) employees must know what they
need to do, how they must perform, to meet those standards, and (3) the standards must
be related to things the employee can control. To gain their benefits, though, managers
must use job performance standards effectively. They must (1) ensure that they observe
enough of each employee’s performance so that the evaluation accurately represents how
people actually perform, (2) differentiate between levels of service performance (don’t just
say everyone is great just to avoid confrontation), and (3) give honest feedback to employ-
ees of what they are doing effectively and ineffectively. By measuring the extent to which
employees meet the standards, the organization will have a good indication of how well
employees are doing their jobs in providing the service. By communicating these results
to employees through performance feedback, good employees can maintain high perfor-
mance levels and poorer performers know what they need to improve.

Managerial Observation of the Delivery Process

The simplest and least expensive technique for assessing the degree to which guest-service
quality is meeting service standards while service is being delivered involves simply en-
couraging managers to keep their eyes open, especially to the interactions between em-
ployees and guests. Management by walking around, sometimes called in hospitality
organizations “walking the front,” means that managers are observing the operation first
hand, looking for problems or inefficiencies, talking to both guests and employees to
assess their reactions, and then recording and relaying any information that might
improve service quality. Managers know their own business, its goals, capabilities, formal
and informal service standards, and the job performance standards for their employees.
They know when employees are delivering a high-quality experience. At their best, these
observations do not interfere with service delivery or do not cause inconvenience to
guests, and they often permit immediate correction of guest service problems. Further,
managerial observation gives the boss the opportunity to reward the excellent employee
immediately or counsel the employee who might not be delivering the service as the orga-
nization wants it delivered. It provides a modeling situation, a “teaching moment,” in
which a supervisor observing a service failure can show the employee how to fix the prob-
lem. When managers walk the front to serve as coaches and not as spies, their presence
favorably influences employee attitudes and performance, and guest satisfaction.
There are, of course, drawbacks to this approach. Some managers may not have enough
experience or training to fully understand what they are observing, or they may have biases
which influence their objectivity. More importantly, when employees know that managers
are observing the service delivery process, they invariably perform it differently. Addition-
ally, although managerial observation may ensure the quality of the experience for a partic-
ular guest, managers can’t watch every guest–employee interaction. The unobserved guest’s
reactions to unobserved experiences remain unknown to the manager.
Of course, hiring good managers can mitigate some of these drawbacks. Training them
in methods of observing guest–server interactions and measuring servers’ performance
against quality standards can reduce both ignorance and personal bias. Unobtrusive ob-
servational techniques, random observations, and video cameras diminish employee
awareness that the boss is watching. For example, many organizations tell their telephone
operators and guests that all phone conversations may be “monitored for training

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
410 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

purposes” to eliminate the observation bias by making it uncertain as to when manage-

ment is actually listening in. The operators know that someone may always be listening,
so they do the job by the book. Some larger companies use managers from one location
to observe employees at another location as mystery shoppers for the same reason.

Employee Assessment of Guest Experiences

While valuable information can be obtained from managerial observation, employees
themselves should be even more aware of how well they are delivering service. Just as
managers can observe by walking around, service-providing employees can constantly
monitor the guest experience and compare it against either formal standards set by man-
agement or informal standards set by their experience, training, and the organization’s
culture. The process of continuously comparing what they see against what they know
they should be seeing enables them to find and fix guest problems, to improve the service
as they are delivering it, and to report any findings or observations that might enable
improvement of the delivery process.
Line employees are often the best people to find and fix service problems and innova-
tively adapt the service experience to meet each guest’s expectations. They can also pro-
vide excellent feedback about the quality of guest experiences that supplements and adds
detail to managerial observation. Line employees can provide input on issues such as
cumbersome company policies and control procedures, managerial reporting structures,
or other processes that inhibit effective service delivery. Because these employees are
watching, talking, and listening to guests, they know firsthand about organizational impe-
diments that prevent them from delivering a memorable service experience. The challenge
as noted earlier is to make sure that all employees feel safe in reporting all the errors in-
cluding those they have made. This is a delicate managerial task to build the level of trust
that encourages employees to report their own failures. They have to believe from man-
agers’ words and deeds that it is better to tell about their failures than to cover them up.
Employee work teams and quality service circles are another source of feedback. The
Ritz-Carlton Hotels uses work teams to gather feedback to develop “zero-defect” guest
service strategies. Such techniques foster an understanding and appreciation of how each
employee can directly influence service quality. Employee awareness of management’s
strong commitment to service quality is affirmed through work teams. They show not
only management trust in employee judgment to correct service problems but also that
management is willing to put its money where its mission is by paying for work time lost
to team participation and employee training. The entire process of the employee empow-
erment movement discussed in Chapter 7 depends on such trust.

The Service Guarantee

To make their service standards clear to customers, companies can offer service guaran-
tees, which may be expressed in simple statements such as “Satisfaction guaranteed or
your money back; no questions asked” or in complex documents resembling contracts. A
service guarantee is a publicly expressed, usually written promise either to satisfy guests
or to compensate them for any failure in part or all of the service.6 If both guests and em-
ployees know the service standards expressed in the guarantee, both parties can measure
quality levels against them as service is being delivered.
Service guarantees are often considered only a marketing tool, to persuade potential
guests unsure about an organization’s quality to give it a try. They have the potential,
however, to do much more for management. That is, they provide a means to encourage

guests to tell the organization what they think of its service quality while sending a strong
message to employees about the organization’s commitment to provide an experience so
good that it can be guaranteed. The guarantee gives guests a strong incentive to tell the
organization when a service experience is not meeting their expectations, and it gives the
organization a strong incentive to fix whatever problems there may be with its service,
staff, or delivery systems, so future guests don’t have the same problems. In 1989
Hampton Inn hotels were the first in the industry to offer an unconditional 100 per-
cent satisfaction guarantee: “If you’re not completely satisfied, we’ll give you your
night’s stay for free.” Every Hampton employee was empowered to approve this re-
fund. According to Stephen Tax and Stephen Brown, the Hampton Inn organization
“realized $11 million in additional revenue from the implementation of its service
guarantee and scored the highest customer retention rate in the industry.”7
Here are some examples of service guarantees:
100% Hampton Inn Guarantee: “Friendly service, clean rooms, comfortable sur-
roundings, every time. If you’re not satisfied, we don’t expect you to pay. That’s
our commitment & your guarantee. That’s 100% Hampton.”
Whitbread Travel Inn: “Everything you want for a good night’s sleep—100 per-
cent satisfaction or your money back.”
Embassy Suites Satisfaction Guarantee: “Embassy Suites Hotels offers an uncondi-
tional 100% Satisfaction Guarantee at all of its hotels. The unprecedented guarantee as-
sures that guests will receive high-quality accommodations, clean, comfortable
surroundings and friendly, efficient service. If guests are not completely satisfied, they
are not expected to pay for that night.”
Priceline’s Sunshine Guarantee: “Travelers booking on Priceline will be refunded
100% of their air fare, hotel, and car rental if it rains more than 0.5 inches per day
on half or more of the holiday. The policy is underwritten by WeatherBill which in-
sures several destination guarantees of vacation perfect weather.”

Organizational Advantages of Guarantees

A good service guarantee should meet several important criteria,8 summarized in Table
12-2. The value of a good guarantee to both guests and the organization is significant.
The service guarantee can have a powerful effect on customer intent to return by signaling
an organization’s commitment to quality to both employees and guests. As described
by Chris Hart,9 service guarantees provide several important benefits for measuring and
improving the effectiveness of the service delivery system:

• The guarantee forces everyone to think about the service from the customer’s point
of view since the customer decides whether to invoke it.
• It pinpoints where the service failed since the customer must give the reason for in-
voking the guarantee, and that reason then becomes measurement data on the ser-
vice delivery system. As Chapter 13 will show, a guest complaint helps a
hospitality organization become better. Guarantees are an incentive to get customers
to complain if their expectations (and the guarantee’s terms) have not been met.
These complaints help the organization fix whatever is wrong before many more
customers have problems.
• It gets everyone to focus quickly on the problem at hand since the costs of making
good on guarantees can be quite large. Once a customer invokes the guarantee, the
cost in lost revenue directs management’s attention to correcting the problem.

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412 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

JetBlue’s Customer Bill

of Rights.

JetBlue Airways

• It enhances the likelihood of recovery from a service failure, because the guest is en-
couraged to demand instant recovery, instead of sending in a negative guest com-
ment card and taking the business to a competitor.
• It sends a strong message to employees and customers alike that the organization
takes its service quality seriously and will stand behind it.

If the company has a strong and well-understood service guarantee that its customers
can and do readily invoke, everyone in the organization can learn much about the service
delivery system from its use. Embassy Suites, for example, takes its guarantee so seriously
that it has created multiple ways to inform guests about the guarantee, such as posting it
on a lobby sign and having it mentioned by the person taking the reservation, the van
driver, and the front desk agent. Using multiple means increases the likelihood that the
guest will know about the guarantee and its message of quality, believe that the guarantee
is real, and use it when things go wrong. The guarantee gives Embassy Suites the oppor-
tunity to fix any service failures before the guest leaves and to solicit feedback from its
guests about any dissatisfaction with the hotel experience.10

11
TAB LE 12 -2 Th e C har a ct er ist i cs of a G oo d S er vic e G uar ant e e

1. Unconditional. The more asterisks attached to the bottom of the page and the more fine print,
the less credible the guarantee will seem to both employees and customers. Few or no condi-
tions should be required to use the guarantee.
2. Transparent. The guarantee must not appear to have any catches or special conditions. The
guarantee should be clear and straightforward and all the “rules” should be known by the
customer.
3. Credible with a high perceived value. If customers don’t believe you will really make good,
then they won’t use the guarantee. They think “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably
is.” The classic illustration is Pizza Hut Delivery’s 30-minutes-or-free guarantee, which was
changed partly because people thought it was too good to be true.
4. Focused on key features of the service. The guarantee should focus on the services that the
guests are most concerned about or the core features of the service product.
5. Supported by significant compensation to the customer. The remedy or compensation should
cover the guest’s dissatisfaction completely. If invoking the guarantee only partially solves the
customer’s problem or is of little consequence to the organization, neither the customer nor
the service people will value the guarantee.
6. Easy to understand and communicate. Follow the old KISS rule: Keep It Simple Stupid. The
more complicated the guarantee is, the less likely anyone will believe or use it.
7. Easy for customers to invoke. Invoking the guarantee and receiving its benefits should be
painless for the guest. The harder a guarantee is to use, the less credible it will be and the less
likely it will help identify serious service problems. Don’t ask customers to fill out a bunch of
forms and talk to several different departments to have their problem solved. It wasn’t their
fault you messed up so why should they have to do all the work to get it fixed?
8. Easy to implement. The policy must also be easy for the company to use. If employees do not
have the authority to implement the guarantee or if internal bureaucratic hurdles unduly de-
lay processing the guarantee, the customer will not perceive the company to be taking its
guarantee seriously.
© Cengage Learning 2012.

Potential Disadvantages of Service Guarantees

Service guarantees do have some downsides. Perhaps the most obvious one is that em-
ployees will not always honor a guarantee when it is invoked. Supervisory commitment
to the guarantee must be shown to reinforce for employees that the organization wants to
make the guarantee known to guests and honor it without qualification or quibbling when
guests invoke it. However, some supervisors may believe that reporting service guarantee
use may negatively impact their annual reviews. They may avoid reporting the data gener-
ated by the service guarantee that could help to improve the service delivery system.
Therefore, the organization must offer incentives to encourage managers, employees, as
well as guests to invoke service guarantees. Companies must also be wary of guests who
may inappropriately invoke the service guarantee. To avoid abuses of the guarantee, for
example, Hampton keeps a database of customers who have invoked it and recommends
another hotel to guests who repeatedly violate the company’s trust. All parties must clearly
understand what the guarantee covers in sufficiently specific terms so that they all take it
seriously and use it only when it is appropriate.

Asking Guests the Right Questions

One of the best ways to find something out is simply to ask. Besides the manager and
employees’ informal observations and inquiries mentioned earlier, there are three addi-
tional in-process methods for acquiring the opinions of guests before they leave the service
setting: informal queries by employees, formal inquiries by employees, and structured
guest interviews.

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414 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Informal Queries by Employees

The most basic way to discover a service problem is simply to ask the guest. The desk
agent who asks about your stay as you check out is a good example. Asking “Was every-
thing OK?” may be the simplest and most effective way to find out if there was a problem.
Some hotels ask employees to act informally as “lobby lizards” by randomly approaching
guests on the property and asking about their experience. Of course, employees should be
able to respond if the answer is “no.” Don’t ask this question unless you are prepared
for a negative answer. Studies show that whether customers seek redress of a problem or
simply let it go is determined by their perception of whether the organization really wants
to hear about it and will act on it. Even customers who are reluctant to complain are more
likely to do so if they perceive that the organization cares and will solve the problem.12
Asking is a basic way to find out if your service has met the guest’s standards.

Formal Inquiries by Employees

As noted earlier, employees are often in the best position to gather feedback from guests
by just listening to them. But this role can be expanded in a more structured way. For ex-
ample, rather than simply ask “How was your stay?” or “How was your meal?” a front
desk agent or restaurant cashier can ask guests a series of carefully developed questions
about their experience and then listen carefully to what they say and observe how they
say it. Because guests may not always recall or report all the important details, employees
recording guest reactions and responses in a systematic survey program can use questions
that are professionally developed and validated, perhaps even scripted, to help ensure that
the information gathered is useful and accurate for both immediate recovery from service
failure (if discovered) and for further analysis.
Acquiring feedback in this way, before guests leave the premises, may allow recovery
from service failures that might otherwise go unnoticed or unreported. Guests who have
not yet left can be offered some compensating benefit or at least an apology to try to offset
any failure. Employee training for many hospitality positions should, therefore, include
appropriate service-recovery techniques, since research confirms that the organization
benefits greatly from soliciting and quickly resolving guest complaints. As we shall discuss
further in Chapter 13, effective hospitality managers know that recovering from service
failures yields greater guest loyalty and repeat visits. In addition, because service quality
information derived directly from the guest is highly believable to both employees and
management, it motivates a quick recovery from service failures.

Structured Inquiries by Professional or Trained Interviewers

Face-to-face guest interviews provide rich information when trained interviewers, able to
detect nuances in responses to open-ended questions, have the opportunity to probe
guests for details about their experiences. These in-depth interviews can uncover previ-
ously unknown problems or new twists to known problems that might not be uncovered
in a preprinted questionnaire or reflected well in numerical data. However, structured
guest interviews are costly. The interviewers must be hired and trained, interview
instruments must be custom designed, and they must be implemented on a clear and
consistent schedule. Of course, it is impossible to conduct such in-depth interviews to
all guests, so guests are typically selected at random. At theme parks and similar attrac-
tions, teams of interviewers roam the parks seeking guest responses. These conver-
sations not only gather useful information about the guests’ assessment of service
quality but also enable the identification of any service failures that can be corrected
while guests are still on the property.

As an alternative to hiring professional interviewers into your company, you may em-
ploy professionals skilled in customer intercepts to conduct the structured guest inter-
views. These consultants can design and implement the structured guest interview and
provide a detailed report of the results to the organization. Because many businesses do
not have the time, resources, or skills needed to design an appropriate structured inter-
view, it is often more efficient to hire professionals to carry out this specialized task.
Regardless of who is conducting the interview, though, it is critical that accurate infor-
mation is collected from guests. To get appropriate participation, inconvenienced guests
must be compensated for participating. Without incentives, most guests see little personal
benefit from participating in an interview unless, as with guest comment cards, they are
motivated by being very satisfied or very dissatisfied with the service experience. Finally,
for most experiences, the most desirable time to interview guests is at the conclusion
when the experience is over but before the guest leaves in case there is a problem requir-
ing resolution. Getting guests’ attention and cooperation when they are most likely anx-
ious to leave, however, can be a significant challenge.

MEASURING SERVICE QUALITY

AFTER THE EXPERIENCE
Companies need good information from their guests in order to evaluate service perfor-
mance and to make any needed changes. The service experience must be measured care-
fully and continuously, to make sure that it consistently meets guest expectations.
Service quality can be measured both during and after the service experience. Collect-
ing information during the experience—by means of managers and employees comparing
the actual service experience against service standards and other methods previously dis-
cussed—provides immediate information and may allow the company to repair the dam-
age if service failures occur (service recovery is the topic of Chapter 13). Collecting
information after the service generally allows more data to be accumulated and can yield
a more representative sample of the organization’s entire customer base. This sampling
process allows more thorough analysis of the service systems. Results can be fed back to
service planners who can then make changes and continuously improve the service.
Techniques to collect data directly from guests vary in cost, convenience, objectivity,
and statistical validity. Informal methods are quick and easy, but generally lack validity.
Formal methods generally can offer statistically valid, reliable, and useful measures of
guest opinion that informal options cannot. Yet, even formal methods can range in so-
phistication, precision, validity, reliability, complexity, and difficulty of administration.
The formal methods are generally more expensive than the informal ones.
The previously described methods of monitoring and assessing quality during service
delivery and before guests have left the service setting are critically important in meeting
the expectations of guests receiving service. But, to meet the goal of continuous improve-
ment and to plan for future service success, hospitality organizations need methods for
obtaining data from guests who have already experienced the service. The following pages
describe several of these methods: comment cards, toll-free 800 numbers, mail and Web
surveys, telephone surveys, critical-incidents surveys, the SERVQUAL instrument, and
guest focus groups. A special service-assessment method called mystery shopping is also
covered. Table 12-3 summarizes the techniques that may be used to assess service after
the service experience.

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416 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

TA BLE 12 - 3 T e chn i qu es f or A ssess ing Q uality Af ter t he Se r vi c e E xp e ri e n ce

T E C H N IQ UE ADVANTAGES DI S A D V A N T A G E S
Comment cards • Communicate company interest • Self-selected sample of customers
in customer opinions of service not statistically representative
quality • Comments generally reflect ex-
• Signed cards are an opportunity treme guest dissatisfaction or ex-
to recover from service failure treme satisfaction
• Low-to-moderate start-up cost • Limited in information provided
• Minimal cost for data gathering • Employees can influence results
and documentation • Time lag between filling out and
• If printed in-house, can be modi- reading of card
fied easily to evaluate needs or • Lack of specifics may make it
new service products difficult to use information to
find real problem

Toll-free 800 • Permit potential and prior custo- • Self-selected sample of customers
numbers mers to ask questions, volunteer not statistically representative
opinions on service • Comments generally reflect ex-
• Opportunity to recover from ser- treme guest dissatisfaction or ex-
vice failure treme satisfaction
• No cost to callers • Time lag between experience and
making phone call may cause
important feedback to get lost in
memory

Surveys: mail • Gather info from potentially rep- • Recollection of details of a spe-
and Web, phone, resentative samples of targeted cific service experience can be
critical incidents customers inexact
• Opportunity to recover from ser- • Other service experiences may
vice failure bias or confuse responses because
• Allow follow-up discussion to of time lag
probe into potential problems • Inconvenience of participation
and opportunities in all parts of makes offering incentives to par-
service experience ticipants necessary
• Send message that company cares • Cost to construct questionnaire and
enough about its service quality then gather and analyze data from
to spend money to ask customers representative sample can be great
what they think about it • Responses may still represent
only highly satisfied or dissatis-
fied guests

Guest focus • Permit potential and prior custo- • Are very expensive
groups mers to ask questions, volunteer • Rely on facilitator skill to enable
opinions on service group participation and focus
• Gather info from potentially rep- discussion
resentative samples of targeted • Small sample can lead to mis-
customers identification of important or
• Send message that company cares overemphasis on unimportant
enough about its service quality opportunities and challenges in
to spend money to ask customers total service experience
what they think about it
• Allow follow-up discussion of
potential problems and opportu-
nities identified by group

(continues)

TAB LE 12 -3 Tech niq ues f or As sessin g Quality Aft er t he S e r v ice Ex pe r ie nce

(C on t in ue d )

TE CHN IQ UE A DV AN TA GE S DI SA DV A NTA GE S
Mystery • Unannounced observation by • Are expensive
shoppers seemingly typical guests allows • May not be used often enough to
sampling of typical experience, gather statistically accurate data
not “dressed up” • Shopper biases, other experi-
• Can be scheduled to observe/test ences, and preferences can over-
specific training outcomes, times or underemphasize quality
of day, or problem areas assessments
• Can be used to observe compet-
ing organizations
• Provide more detailed data on all
elements of service experience
• Can be very accurate on objec-
tively measured elements of
experience
• Are more accurate than guest
feedback on subjective aspects of
experience
• Employees see shopper feedback
as less subjective than manager’s
performance review
© Cengage Learning 2012.

Comment Cards
Other than asking guests the right questions before they leave, comment cards are the
cheapest and easiest to use of all formal data collection methods. If properly designed,
they are easy to tally and analyze. These advantages make them attractive for gathering
guest-satisfaction data, especially for smaller organizations that cannot afford a quality as-
sessment staff or consultants. Widely found throughout the hospitality industry, comment
cards rely on voluntary guest participation. Guests rate the quality of the guest experience
by responding to a few simple questions on a conveniently available form, typically a post-
card. Guests deposit the form in a drop box, return it directly to the service provider, or
mail it to the corporate office.
Increasingly, companies are using the Internet to implement the comment cards
method. Companies provide Web addresses in visibly prominent areas on their printed
material such as credit card receipts and bill copies; many post them in their ads, on their
coupons, and any other place their customers might see them. Most organizations use a
“contact us” link on their Web sites to provide a mailing address and contact names for
those customers who prefer to write their comments to a specific person or functional
area. Many paper comment cards include a Web address so that customers can complete
the card online rather than on paper. Some companies such as Marriott and Olive Garden
have completely replaced paper comment cards with electronic ones. The benefits of
using the Internet to collect comment cards are that the data can be easily monitored,
sorted, and analyzed, and the technology usually offers an easy way for the company to
respond to customer comments.
What questions should appear on the comment cards? The organization studies its
guests to determine their expectations and then embodies those expectations in the
comment-card questions. If studies show a restaurant that its guests expect a friendly
greeting, a properly setup table area, and overall cleanliness, its card will ask guests

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
418 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Maxie’s Supper Club,

located in Ithaca New
York, strives to provide
great New Orleans-style
food and warm profes-
sional service
Maxie’s Supper Club and Oyster Bar

Maxie’s Supper Club’s

Comment Card.
Maxie’s Supper Club and Oyster Bar

about those elements of the guest experience. If an organization tries to differentiate

itself from similar organizations, questions regarding the differentiating factors may
appear on the comment card, so that the organization can gauge the success of its
differentiation strategy.
Once the issues that the comment card should address are known, it should then be
carefully designed. To do this, according to Bartkus and colleagues,13 comments cards
should adhere to the following guidelines:
1. Include a secure return mechanism (e.g., locked drop box or postage-paid mail)
2. Make introductory statements brief and neutral, not leading
3. Provide an opportunity to complete the comment card using the Internet
4. Limit the number of questions; don’t make the survey too long
5. Provide enough writing space for open-ended questions
6. Make questions concise, and ask about only one issue in each question
7. For closed-ended questions, use at least five response points
8. Make questions neutral (e.g., “How was your stay”) rather than containing positive
cues (e.g., “What did we do especially well?”) or negative (“Were there any problems
with your stay?”).
Of course, comment cards are available in many forms and styles. Consider the follow-
ing examples:

• The West Inn and Suites14 asks guests to evaluate the front desk, housekeeping,
maintenance, and breakfast, in addition to providing general comments using a
four-point scale (Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor) with an opportunity to provide
open-ended comments also.
• The Hilton Garden Inn at the Montreal Airport uses a ten-point scale to assess over-
all satisfaction and two questions related to the likelihood of return and overall
value for price paid.
• The Rusty Pelican asks guests how often they visit, their favorite thing about the
restaurant, what the restaurant should do to get them to visit more often, and
whether they’d recommend the restaurant to a friend, and it provides a place for
“other comments.”

Completed comment cards indicate whether the organization is meeting the general
expectations of the guests who take the time to fill them out. Written remarks about long
waits for food, long lines at the front desk, or housekeeping problems reveal the weak-
nesses of the service delivery system, the personnel and their training, and the service
product itself. Positive comments provide management with the opportunity to find and
fix service delivery system problems, rework the service product, and, importantly, recog-
nize employee performance. Positive comments can be used to reinforce the behaviors
that lead to good guest service and create role models and stories about how to provide
outstanding service that other employees can use in shaping their own behavior in their
jobs. Negative comments can be used for individual coaching, departmental training
(without mentioning specific employees) to illustrate behaviors that caused negative guest
experiences, and as input for reviewing employee training programs. Using comment
cards in these ways allows managers to coach and train employees about how to provide
excellent guest service through the voices of the guests themselves.
Comments accumulated from cards may be categorized and plotted as numerical va-
lues on bar graphs and charts that visually display how guests perceived their experience.
The plots will suggest whether service failures are occurring occasionally and randomly,
or whether overall service quality might be deteriorating.

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420 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Disadvantages
The greatest disadvantage of comment cards is that many guests ignore them and don’t
fill them out, so the cards received are not likely to be a true general picture of guest per-
ceptions. Typically, only 5 percent of customers are motivated to return comment cards,
and they are usually either very satisfied or very dissatisfied with the service experience.
Managers don’t even know what percentage of the delighted total or the dissatisfied total
these responses represent. The other 95 percent say nothing. Were they happy, unhappy,
or indifferent? You might guess that they are indifferent, but there is a very good chance
you would be wrong. A large percentage of dissatisfied guests fill out no cards, leave qui-
etly, and never return. To help overcome the lack of response, some companies use in-
centives, like coupons or potential cash prizes, to encourage participation. These
incentives do help increase participation, but of course they also cost additional money.
Another major disadvantage of comment cards, and in fact of many methods for ac-
quiring feedback, is that the time lag between guest response and managerial review pre-
vents on-the-spot correction of service gaps and failures. Once the moment of truth has
passed and the angry or disappointed guest leaves after expressing negative responses on
a comment card, the opportunity to recapture that guest’s future business is diminished.
Even worse, negative word-of-mouth advertising generated by dissatisfied guests cannot
be corrected. Moreover, card usefulness can be impacted by employees themselves who
may try to influence guests in filling them out. Some employees will watch guests while
they fill out cards or even tell guests what to put down on the cards to influence the
grades given, especially when scores may affect employees personally. If bonuses rest on
comment-card scores, good comment cards will be kept and bad ones may disappear.
While guest comments and their visual representations are interesting and helpful to
management, the information lacks statistical validity, one reason being that the random-
sample requirement of most statistical techniques is not met because the guests who re-
spond tend not to be representative of all customers that organization serves.
Because of the negatives associated with comment cards, some restaurants simply de-
cide not to use them. For example, one of this book’s authors asked the hostess at a Legal
Sea Foods restaurant for a comment card. She said that the restaurant no longer uses
them, and then asked if he would like to speak to a manager. Such a procedure conveys
a simple yet powerful message: don’t fill out a card; instead, tell us about your experience,
and, if there is a problem, let us hear directly from you so we can try to fix it immediately.

Toll-Free 800 Numbers

Another way of measuring the quality of service is the customer-service 800 telephone
number. This technique lets customers say what’s on their minds twenty-four hours a
day. This method also allows companies to get back in touch with customers to let them
know how they addressed problems and comments. Like the guest comment cards, the
usefulness of the 800 number depends upon the willingness of the guests to respond,
and even the convenience of this method does not guarantee a representative response
from all types of guests. Some companies also offer incentives such as coupons to encour-
age customers to call the 800 numbers. Others enter the caller into a lottery to win cash
or other prizes.

New Technologies for Gathering Feedback

As technology changes and improves, companies are looking for new ways to get new and
better information from their customers. The goal is to use new technology to solicit more

representative feedback, get better response rates, and be able to use the information
more effectively.
For example, Marriott’s Fairfield Inns developed their Fairfield Inns Scorecard pro-
gram as a means to get greater customer participation than comment cards, 800 numbers,
or Web sites typically receive. At checkout, guests are asked to answer several brief ques-
tions on a computer touch screen while the receptionist is processing the bill. Responding
by touching a computer screen is easy and the guests need to wait at least briefly as the
bill is processed. Most guests are willing to share their opinions about the quality of their
hotel stay while the experience is fresh in their minds. This provides much better informa-
tion to Marriott than they would receive if they received comment cards from just the
very happy or very unhappy customers.15
BD’s Mongolian Barbeque uses an electronic customer comment card. This hand-held
device is provided to each table at the end of a meal. Customers input data that are im-
mediately processed. The technology encourages more customers to complete the evalua-
tion and enables easier analysis of the data. For example, the company can look at
evaluations by server and shift and can track the number of declined requests to complete
the survey. Furthermore, by means of a wireless paging system, the device also alerts
managers to serious guest problems (such as a guest indicating that she does not plan to
patronize the operation again), allowing the manager to take immediate action.16
Hospitality organizations seeking feedback on their service experiences will find ways
to take advantage of the Web generation’s inclination to be in constant communication
with everybody as much as possible. Some organizations are already providing addresses so
that customers can tweet their reactions while they are still in the midst of their experiences.

Surveys
Mail/Web Surveys
Well-developed mail or Web-based surveys, sent to an appropriate and willing sample,
can provide trustworthy information concerning guest satisfaction. Brinker International,
the parent company of such restaurants as Chili’s, On the Border Mexican Grill and Can-
tina, and Maggiano’s Little Italy, has developed a variation that combines the mail survey
and the frequent-diner card program. The feedback advantages of the survey join with the
card’s promotion of guest loyalty and return visits. Once Brinker obtains basic guest de-
mographic information on an application form for the card, it not only can record the
buying patterns for that customer whenever the card is used but it can use the guest’s ad-
dress information to follow up with mailed surveys that will collect valuable feedback on
eating preferences and patterns.
Yet, while organizations can use mailed or Web surveys to their benefit, many uncon-
trollable factors can influence guest responses to them. Inaccurate and incomplete mailing
lists or Web addresses, or a simple lack of interest in responding, can produce a participa-
tion rate too small to provide useful information. In addition, the time lag between the
experience and filling out a survey can blur a guest’s memory of details. Further, many
people have so many experiences across their lives that it is difficult to recall specifics of
any one of them, especially when it was brief or unmemorable. Trying to learn why the
experience you provided is not memorable is impossible when customers can’t remember
anything about it.
While these surveys are usually used to generate reports full of numbers, the subtleties
of the guest experience and guest perceptions cannot be fully expressed numerically. Also,
averages may not be sufficiently informative. If some guests remember an experience as

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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422 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

terrific and give it a high rating while an equal number of other guests rate it low as terri-
ble, the numerical average would suggest that guest expectations were met on average.
Finally, formal mail or Web-based survey techniques require proper questionnaire de-
velopment, validation, and data analysis, so they can be expensive.

Telephone Surveys and Interviews

Telephone surveys and interviews are another useful method for assessing customer per-
ceptions of service. Car dealerships, for example, frequently use telephone surveys to mea-
sure customer satisfaction with a recent transaction. In the hospitality industry, some tour
operators call their customers to obtain feedback about a recent vacation experience while
paving the way for subsequent travel arrangements.
Telephone surveys and interviews are easy to conduct and can be inexpensive. If the
company’s own employees make the calls in their slack times, the only costs are for setting
up a well-designed interview/questionnaire and a calling strategy/protocol that will yield
the best possible statistical results. The data-collection process must ensure that the data
are captured into a database that will permit solid analysis of the responses. Moreover, a
telephone survey allows the immediate identification of service failures (or successes). The
guest being called might well tell the interviewer about a failure that would not otherwise
have been reported to anyone who might be able to fix it or offer restitution. Finally, the
telephone survey allows the company caller to probe deeper into issues raised by the re-
spondent in ways that no online or mailed questionnaire can. Only a face-to-face encoun-
ter is a better way of digging deeper to capture the whole story behind either a service
success or failure in sufficient detail to ensure that the service experience was provided in
the way it was supposed to be or to find out why it wasn’t.
Unfortunately, although telephone interviews eliminate the inconvenience to guests of
gathering information while guests are still in the service location, they do present other
challenges. Telephone interviews can be expensive when organizations use a trained inter-
viewer who uses a sophisticated questionnaire to solicit feedback from guests. When data
analysis and expert interpretation are included, the total cost for a statistically valid survey
can become quite high.
This technique, like surveys, also relies on retrospective information that can be
blurred by the passage of time. If the service received was too brief or insignificant for
guests to recall accurately, or if guests have no special motivation to participate, the infor-
mation they provide is likely to be unreliable or incomplete. In addition, in this age of
intense telephone solicitation, customers often regard telephone surveys as intrusions
on their time and violations of their privacy. Annoyed respondents feeling resentment
toward the organization for calling them at home are likely to bias the data. Red Lobster
and Captain D’s avoid some of these difficulties by building into their guest checks a code
that asks every nth guest to call an 800 number to respond by pressing Touchtone buttons
to questions about their experience at the restaurant. In return for participation, the res-
taurant offers coupons for free desserts or “two entrées for the price of one” when the
guest visits the next time.

Critical-Incidents Surveys
Another important survey tool is the critical-incidents technique. Through interviews or
paper-and-pencil surveys, customers are asked to identify and evaluate numerous mo-
ments—classified as dissatisfiers, neutral, or satisfiers—in their interactions with the organi-
zation. The survey lets the organization know which moments are critical to customer
satisfaction, and the critical dissatisfiers can be traced back to their root causes and rectified.

In one study done by a cruise line, for example, passengers were asked to describe one
positive and one negative aspect of their cruise either on board or at a port of call that
might have impacted their decision to take another cruise with this company’s ships. Analy-
sis of the responses indicated that ten negative and eight positive categories or themes
emerged as critical incidents and factors. Once the cruise line knew which incidents passen-
gers viewed as most important in determining their post-cruise evaluations of satisfaction
(e.g., service, staff, and food), it could concentrate on turning any incidents with negative
ratings into positives.17

Servqual
Of the many service quality measures that have been developed,18 one well-accepted tech-
nique is SERVQUAL (short for “service quality”), developed by A. Parasuraman and his
associates. An adaptation of the SERVQUAL survey instrument, designed to evaluate ser-
vice quality at Belle’s Restaurant, is presented in Figure 12-2. SERVQUAL has been

FIGURE 1 2 - 2 Instrument for Measuring Guest Perceptions of

Service Quality at Belle’s Restaurant

DIRECTIONS:

Listed below are five features pertaining to Belle’s Restaurant and the services they
offer. We would like to know how important each of these features is to you when
you evaluate a restaurant’s quality. Please allocate a total of 100 points among the
five features according to how important each feature is to you—the more important
a feature is to you, the more points you should allocate to it. Please ensure that the
points you allocate to the five features add up to 100.
1. The appearance of the restaurant’s physical facilities, equipment, and
personnel. points
2. The ability of the restaurant to perform the promised service dependably and
accurately. points
3. The willingness of the restaurant to help customers and provide prompt
service. points
4. The knowledge and courtesy of the restaurant’s employees and their ability to
convey trust and confidence. points
5. The caring, individualized attention the restaurant provides to its customers.
points

DIRECTIONS:

Based on your experience as a customer of restaurants, please think about the kind of
restaurant that would deliver excellent service quality. Think about the kind of restau-
rant at which you would be pleased to eat. Please show the extent to which you think
such a restaurant would possess the feature described by each statement. If you feel a
feature is not at all essential for excellent restaurants such as the one you have in
mind, circle the number “1” for Strongly Disagree. If you feel a feature is absolutely
essential for excellent restaurants, circle “7” for Strongly Agree. If your feelings are
less strong, circle one of the numbers in the middle. There are no right or wrong
answers—all we are interested in is a number that truly reflects your feelings regarding
restaurants that would deliver excellent service quality. [The 22 survey items for this
section are the same as those in the next section, but without any reference to
Belle’s Restaurant.]

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424 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

DIRECTIONS:

The following set of statements relate to your feelings about the service at Belle’s Res-
taurant. For each statement, please show the extent to which you believe Belle’s Res-
taurant has the feature described by the statement. Once again, circling a “1” means
that you Strongly Disagree that Belle’s Restaurant has that feature, and circling a “7”
means that you Strongly Agree. You may circle any of the numbers in the middle that
show how strong your feelings are. There are no right or wrong answers—all we are
interested in is a number that best shows your perceptions about the service at Belle’s
Restaurant. [On the instrument itself, the five category labels (Tangibles, etc.)
would be omitted.]

TANGIBLES

1. Belle’s Restaurant has modern-looking equipment.

2. Belle’s Restaurant’s physical facilities are visually appealing.
3. Belle’s Restaurant’s employees are neat-appearing.
4. Materials associated with the service (such as menus) are visually appealing at
Belle’s Restaurant.

RELIABILITY

5. When Belle’s Restaurant promises to do something by a certain time, it does so.

6. When you have a problem, Belle’s Restaurant shows sincere interest in solving it.
7. Belle’s Restaurant performs the service right the first time.
8. Belle’s Restaurant provides its services in the way it promises to do so.
9. Belle’s Restaurant insists on error-free service performance.

RESPONSIVENESS
10. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant tell you exactly when services will be performed.
11. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant give you prompt service.
12. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant are always willing to help you.
13. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant are never too busy to respond to your requests.

ASSURANCE

14. The behavior of Belle’s Restaurant employees instills confidence in customers.

15. You feel safe in going to Belle’s Restaurant and doing business with them.
16. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant are consistently courteous to you.
17. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant have the knowledge to answer your questions.

EMPATHY

18. Belle’s Restaurant gives you individual attention.

19. Belle’s Restaurant has operating hours convenient to all its customers.
20. Belle’s Restaurant has employees who give you personal attention.
21. Belle’s Restaurant has your best interests at heart.
22. Employees of Belle’s Restaurant try to learn your specific needs.

Source: Adapted from A. Parasuraman, V. A. Zeithaml, and L. L. Berry. 1988. SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale
for Measuring Consumer Perception of Service Quality. Journal of Retailing. 64(1): 38–40. Used with permission.

extensively researched to validate its psychometric properties. It measures the way custo-
mers perceive the quality of service experiences in five categories: tangibles (the physical
facilities, equipment, and personnel), reliability (the organization’s ability to perform the
desired service dependably, accurately, and consistently), responsiveness (its willingness
to provide prompt service and help customers), assurance (employee knowledge, cour-
tesy, and ability to convey trust), and empathy (providing caring, individualized attention
to customers).19
SERVQUAL also asks respondents to rate the relative importance of the five areas, so
organizations can understand what matters most to customers. In each area SERVQUAL
asks customers what they expected and what they actually have experienced, to identify
service gaps at which organizations should direct attention. Figure 12-2 shows how the
items on the SERVQUAL instrument might be adapted to a restaurant situation.
The SERVQUAL instrument reflects a point we have made throughout—the impor-
tance of the frontline server to service quality. While tangibles refer primarily to the set-
ting and to the physical elements of the delivery system, and reliability reflects a
combination of organizational ability and server ability, the remaining three elements—
responsiveness, assurance, and empathy—are almost exclusively the responsibility of the
frontline server.
If an organization’s quality ratings on any of the SERVQUAL categories are unsatisfac-
tory, it might consider setting up performance standards for the unsatisfactory items. For
example, if the responsiveness ratings are unsatisfactory, standards could be established
for promptness and helpfulness.

Focus Groups
Focus groups provide in-depth information on how guests view the service they receive.
Typically, six to ten guests gather with a facilitator for several hours to discuss perceived
problems and make suggestions. Researcher J. Santos used focus groups to discover the
critical characteristics for e-service Web sites.20 By asking participants to bring in exam-
ples of good and bad Web sites to the group discussions, researchers identified many
important factors that were important to e-service. Many hospitality organizations rou-
tinely invite current or former guests to participate in focus groups to discover their feel-
ings about and perceptions of existing or potential service experiences. Current guests
are especially valuable because they can share their reactions and insights before they
leave the premises, before they can forget the details of the service they just experienced.
Focus-group guests are usually impressed that the company cares enough about their
opinions to ask for them, and they use the free return admission, complimentary dinner,
or other expression of appreciation that compensates them for their time.
Focus groups are useful but also expensive, time consuming, and labor intensive. They
require a group facilitator, meeting space, travel and sometimes lodging expenses for the
facilitator and participants, and, typically, some compensation to the participants. Since
focus groups should represent the targeted customer market, correct selection of partici-
pants is crucial in obtaining accurate information. If the customer sample is not accurate
or doesn’t match the desired customer profile, the resulting information can lead to inap-
propriate conclusions about customer experiences. A large hospitality organization like a
theme park can pick ideal and representative groups from its thousands of customers; an
individual restaurant, a hotel, or a travel agency will have much greater difficulty in
assembling a focus group that accurately represents the targeted customer profile.

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426 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Customers Evaluating Service on Their Own

We have reviewed a number of ways in which companies can solicit feedback from custo-
mers. However, with the Internet facilitating the spread of information, and with so much
information available through social media sources, customers often don’t wait for the
company to ask them what they think. Individuals post blogs, post information to com-
pany Web sites, send in unsolicited letters and e-mails, provide reviews on Web sites like
TripAdvisor, or express their opinions on discussion boards. When researching where to
stay or eat, many people look for these unsolicited reviews in places like blogs, TripAdvi-
sor, or Yelp with the hope of finding useful information about the quality of various ser-
vice products.
While customers posting information on their own is generally out of the company’s
control, some organizations proactively monitor this information to look for problems.
Many hoteliers monitor TripAdvisor to see if any complaints have been posted. Some or-
ganizations use search tools to scan through blogs for mentions of their establishments.
Other companies are hiring consulting companies specifically devoted to monitoring and
tracking social media comments and trends. Clearly, when considering unsolicited infor-
mation, the company has no idea of who responded, if they actually stayed or ate at the
establishment, are expressing a typical problem, have some ulterior motives, or are actu-
ally real customers trying to give useful reviews. Nonetheless, this information is widely
available and it does affect customer decisions, and so the best companies pay attention
and seek to address problems that may appear in these customer-generated sources.

Mystery Shoppers
Mystery shoppers or secret shoppers provide management with a relatively objective
snapshot of the guest experience. While posing as guests, these sometimes trained and
sometimes untrained observers methodically sample the service and its delivery, take
note of the environment, and then send a systematic and detailed report of their experi-
ence back to management. They are often specifically instructed to determine if service
standards were met (did the server introduce herself, did their drinks come in under three
minutes, were they offered an appetizer, etc.). They can sample a restaurant meal, a trip
on a cruise ship, or an overnight stay at a full-service resort hotel. Shopper reports gener-
ally include numerical ratings of their observations so that assessments of the guest expe-
rience can be compared over time and with other organizations. While employees usually
know that their organization uses a mystery-shopper program, they don’t know who the
shoppers are or when they will shop. Owners of smaller organizations, such as indepen-
dent restaurateurs or hoteliers, can hire an individual consultant or ask a personal friend
or university class to conduct a mystery-shopper program. Larger organizations and na-
tional chains may employ a commercial service or use their own staff as shoppers.
Since visits by mystery shoppers are unannounced, employees cannot “dress up” their
performance. Research shows that shoppers are especially accurate when reporting objec-
tive aspects of the service experience (e.g., Server uniforms clean? Paper towels/trash on
rest room floors?) where service standards are clearly set. In addition, shoppers can be
scheduled at specific times to assess the quality of service during various shifts, under di-
verse conditions, with different employees, and through the eyes of different types of
shoppers.21 For example, a hotel designed as a family resort employed a shopper and her
children to assess the “family-friendly” factor at the property. The children said the front
desk counters were too high and prevented them from seeing what was going on. As a re-
sult, a special registration desk was installed where young guests could check in and learn
about the activities available for them at the hotel.

Mystery shoppers can also observe competing organizations in a particular market and
systematically gather information on their service level, facilities, prices, and special
packages. Some hotels employ mystery shoppers to test the ability of their properties to
respond to anticipated service problems and service delivery failures. For example, shop-
pers can create a problem or intensify a situation by asking certain questions or requesting
unique services to assess employee responses under pressure.
Mystery shoppers can also gauge the effectiveness of a particular training or incentive
program by shopping at a hospitality organization before and after the training occurs or
incentive is implemented. They are more accurate than customer surveys when the expe-
rience or service encounter being assessed is too brief for most guests to recall accurately.
Finally, and most importantly, mystery shoppers give managers objective data to use in
coaching employees identified by the mystery shopper as performing poorly or in praising
those identified as performing well. Because the appraisal is provided not by a manager
but by a real customer, employees are more likely to accept the assessment as objective
and fair. A manager can collaborate on improvements with employees when the perfor-
mance data come from customers themselves.
The main disadvantage of using a mystery shopper is the small size of the sample from
which the shopper generates reports. Since anyone can have a bad day or a bad shift, a
mystery shopper may base conclusions on unusual or atypical experiences. One or two
observations are not a statistically valid sample of anything, but hiring enough mystery
shoppers to yield a valid sample would be impractical and too expensive for many organi-
zations. Further, the unique preferences, biases, or expectations of individual shoppers
can unduly influence a report. Well-trained shoppers with specific information about the
organization’s service standards, instructions on what to observe, and guidelines for eval-
uating the experience avoid this pitfall.
One restaurant, for example, employed mystery shoppers for daily visits to units in the
chain. The data confirmed that the benefits in improved customer service and headcount
outweighed the costs of the daily shopper program. The mystery shoppers were reim-
bursed only up to a fixed amount, and they were required to bring at least one paying din-
ner partner. Not only did this approach generate positive revenues, but further analysis
revealed that the shopper program had the effect of a marketing campaign using coupons
to get customers to try the restaurant, as the mystery shoppers liked the restaurant so
much they were returning again and again to eat.22

FINDING AND USING THE TECHNIQUE

THAT FITS
Tables 12-1 and 12-3 provide an overview of quality assessment methods and show some
advantages and disadvantages of each. Organizations should choose the techniques that fit
their particular purposes. A luxury resort hotel, for example, may require more elaborate
and expensive strategies to measure feedback since any reports of poor service can harm
the reputation and bottom line of the hotel, the brand with which the hotel is affiliated,
and the livelihood of countless employees up and down the line. The value to such a hotel
of finding and correcting service failures so that it can deliver the service quality its guests
expect is tremendous. Failing to meet guest expectations will quickly make the hotel and
all services and business affiliated with it uncompetitive in a dynamic marketplace. On the
other hand, a small independent restaurant whose owner loves to “interview” his patrons
will probably not require sophisticated quality assessment methods.

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428 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

Costs and level of expertise used to gather data also vary. An important question to ask
is who should collect data: line employees, managers, consultants, or a professional survey
research organization. Using line employees and managers is the least expensive alternative,
but they also have the least expertise in research and may lack the communication skills to
interview effectively. Consultants and survey organizations cost more, but they are better
able to gather and interpret more detailed statistical data using more sophisticated techni-
ques. Employee-surveyors cannot measure eye-pupil dilation; some professionals can.
Finally, the organization must consider when to request feedback. Is information to be
collected during or after the service is delivered? The best companies do not limit them-
selves to one approach and hope for the best; they do both. Information collected during
the service experience (such as by talking to guests, using management by walking
around, monitoring adherence to service standards and guarantees, using employee as-
sessments of the guest experience, or having the technology to receive immediate feed-
back on evaluations) allows companies to react immediately to any problems. This
information, though, cannot be analyzed in depth (at least at that moment) because by
its nature it requires quick decision making to respond to immediate customer concerns.
Information collected after the service experience (such as through analyzing comment
cards, toll-free numbers, surveys, and gathering reports from mystery shoppers) gives
companies much more detailed information about service quality. Taking the time to con-
duct detailed analysis provides valuable information on trends in guest services and issues,
indicates where problems might be emerging, and helps spot service problems that can
perhaps be fixed before they escalate into large service failures.

Your Best Evaluators: The Guests

Regardless of the evaluation technique selected to measure service quality, one thing is
certain. Guests evaluate service every time it is delivered, forming distinct opinions about
its quality and value. All hospitality organizations that aspire to excellence must constantly
assess the quality of their guest experience through their guests’ eyes—while planning the
experience, during the experience, and after it is over. Although guests will usually offer
an unsolicited opinion only if they are very satisfied or dissatisfied with their experience,
most guests are happy to offer an opinion if they are asked in the right way at the right
time. Telephone surveyors calling on Friday night at dinner time will get the rejection
they deserve. Hospitality managers striving for excellence need to find appropriate meth-
ods to elicit from guests the information necessary to ensure service that meets and ex-
ceeds guest expectations.

The Improvement Cycle Continues

Once the systems for identifying service failures and delivery system flaws have been put
in place, the data that they have generated have been collected systematically, and the cus-
tomers who were the source of complaints have been contacted and offered restitution,
the organization can now use all of this information to revisit its planning process for the
entire service experience. Knowing what has failed, and even what has not failed, provides
the knowledge needed to reassess all aspects of the service experience to ensure that
where it has not met guest expectations, it will do so in the future; where it has only met
expectations, it might be improved to exceed them; and where it has exceeded expecta-
tions, it can learn why and how to extend the features that led to success to other parts
of the experience. In other words, the benchmark organizations in hospitality or any
service industry use information to learn how to improve. A key element in the
continuous-improvement philosophy—which the best organizations use to drive continual

reassessment of what they do—is to learn from their own history how to improve their
future. The tools and techniques covered across the past several chapters are the means
by which they gather the information needed to drive continuous improvement. Using
these tools and techniques consistently and effectively is how the best stay the best.

1. The quality of employee work and the quality of guest service can be different; LESSONS LEARNED
manage so as to achieve high quality in both.
2. If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you don’t manage it, you
can’t improve it.
3. Balance the value of service information obtained from guests with the cost of obtain-
ing it.
4. Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of available assessment techniques.
5. The more sophisticated the information needed from guests, the more expensive it is
to acquire.
6. If you want to become or stay the best, be proactive. Be driven to continuously learn
and improve.

1. Is it critically important for hospitality organizations to measure how satisfied guests REVIEW QUESTIONS
are with service quality and value? Or is it sometimes sufficient for organizations sim-
ply to offer the best service they can and hope for the best?
2. Regarding the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for measuring service
quality:
A. What are the strengths and weaknesses of managerial observation?
B. What are the strengths and weaknesses of guest comment cards?
C. Why is the comment card technique used so frequently in spite of its
weaknesses?
3. What provisions would you expect to find in a typical service guarantee for a restaurant?
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages to restaurants of offering such a
guarantee?
B. How might the service guarantees of a quick-serve restaurant and a fine-dining
restaurant differ?
C. Why would a hotel be more apt to use a guarantee than a restaurant, or a res-
taurant than a hotel? Do the restaurants with which you are familiar have
guarantees?
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages to hospitality organizations of mystery
shoppers? In which types of hospitality organizations do you think mystery shoppers
would be most and least effective?
5. To what extent should managers use a cost/benefit analysis when trying to determine
which techniques to use to measure the guest’s perception of the guest experience’s
quality and value?

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430 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

ACTIVITIES 1. Collect guest comment cards or examine Web-based surveys from several hospitality
organizations and compare the factors about which organizations solicit comments.
What conclusions can you draw? If possible, interview the managers whose organiza-
tions make the cards or Web-surveys available to guests and ask how the managers
use the results.
2. Imagine that you are a mystery shopper for a hotel. Write up a list of the activities in
which you would engage, starting with deciding how long you will stay to do a thor-
ough evaluation (twenty-four hours? forty-eight hours?). Develop service standards,
such as for calling in to make a reservation. (What will your “number of rings” stan-
dard be? three rings? four rings?, and so forth.) What evaluation system will you use
for the different hotel areas? Pass/fail? An excellent-through-poor scale?
3. Go mystery shopping. If appropriate, use some of the activities from your hotel evalu-
ation list created for question 2. Or do a quick evaluation or service audit using “the
three Ts”—Task, Treatment, Tangibles. Write up a brief description of what you
found and observed on your shopping trip and send it to the manager of the service
location.
4. Either in groups or individually, use Hart’s criteria for a good service guarantee as
presented in this chapter and create a guarantee for a real or imaginary hospitality
organization.

ETHICS IN BUSINESS A national restaurant chain in the United States has an interesting policy to help
detect service problems. If any tip to a server is particularly low, the server must
immediately report it to the manager. The manager then inquires as to what problem
there might have been. If there was a problem, the manager can perhaps take some
steps to correct the situation. This policy raises some interesting questions:
1. Is it appropriate to require servers to report low tips? The requirement may place the
server in a very uncomfortable position. A server may have to report a low tip knowing
it is justified because of his poor service, or the server may know that everything was
fine and by reporting the low tip, she will be placing the customer in an uncomfort-
able and embarrassing situation. On the other hand, failure to report a low tip can re-
sult in the server being fired. Is it appropriate to put servers in this position?
2. What responsibility, if any, does a restaurant have to inform customers as to what is
an appropriate tip? Many tourists from other countries do not know the “norm” in
the United States to provide a tip of 15 percent–20 percent of check size. Even many
Americans do not necessarily know this “norm.” Should the company take steps to
educate customers before causing them public embarrassment?

CASE STUDIES

Try Before You Buy: The Service Guarantee

Ed Jennings had never stayed at Super 10 Suites before, sink, paper scraps on the floor, and mold in the
but he hadn’t been very satisfied with the only other shower.”
lodging establishment in Grover, Montana, a regular
“No,” said the clerk. “The guarantee says that the
stop in his western sales territory, so he decided to try
room will be cleaned, and it was cleaned, last week. As
Super 10. The guarantee of service offered by Super 10
for inspection, I inspected it myself.”
persuaded him to make the switch. It was basic, but it
offered all that Ed wanted: Ed said, “When you inspected it, didn’t you notice the
scraps, the hair, and the mold?”
“Try before you buy. We guarantee that your rooms
will be cleaned, inspected and ready, with all amenities in “This guarantee doesn’t say anything about what I no-
place, or you pay nothing! No questions asked. We want ticed or didn’t notice. It just says the room was in-
you to be happy in your choice of Super 10 Suites, spected. And before you even ask about the amenities,
Grover’s finest.” that’s what the pretzels are—amenities.”
Ed checked in late in the evening after a hard day on “All that may be true,” said Ed, “but this guarantee
the road, went to his room, and looked around. The says ‘No questions asked.’ “
room wasn’t exactly dirty, but it wasn’t exactly clean ei-
“Didn’t you see the asterisk by that? Didn’t you see
ther. There were small scraps of paper on the floor, some
the fine print?” asked the clerk. “The asterisk refers to
hair in the sink, and mold in the shower. He sat down in
our statement at the bottom that if you ask questions,
a chair, opened the complimentary bag of pretzels, and
this guarantee is null and void. This other asterisk, which
chewed on one while he thought about whether to stay or
apparently you didn’t see either, says that ‘This guaran-
to leave.
tee and the terms thereof shall be valid and its terms ex-
“Oh, well, if it doesn’t get any worse than this, I guess ercisable with respect to the cost of one night’s room
I can take it.” only, with all the covenants appertaining thereunto.
Management shall retain its sole and exclusive right to
Without going into all the details, it did get worse.
interpret the terms of the guarantee.’ In my opinion,
The hot water didn’t work, the bed was lumpy, and the
and I’m the management this morning, we fulfilled our
air conditioner failed during the night. A screaming baby
guarantee to you the guest, and then some.”
in the next room kept Ed awake for several hours. When
Ed checked out the next day, he informed the clerk that Ed Jennings gave it up. He had sales calls to make.
he was exercising his service guarantee; he wasn’t going Mighty tired and upset, he headed out into the day.
to pay. Of course the clerk asked why, and Ed explained
What was wrong with this guarantee? Indicate as
the problems he had experienced.
many faults as you can.
“Your guarantee said the room would be clean and
inspected, and it was not clean. There was hair in the

Standard Times at Happy’s Restaurant

The top management at Happy’s Restaurants, Inc., had Laura Martin, manager of a very successful and prof-
assigned its new Work Methods and Standards Depart- itable Happy’s Restaurant in South Carolina, got the
ment the task of establishing “standard times” for the e-mailed memo about the new “standard times for food
chain’s units. Work Methods personnel went out into and cocktail service” late one afternoon. A highly experi-
the restaurants as mystery shoppers and observed opera- enced server herself and a respected manager, Martin
tions carefully. Work Methods then reported to manage- just laughed at the proposed standards and set the
ment that the speed and efficiency of service in virtually memo aside. She thought she had noticed some mystery
all of the restaurants was in need of improvement. shoppers making secret notes, so she had expected some

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432 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

kind of ivory-tower memo like this. It might look good on at first, but they can meet the standards if you lay down
paper, but it just couldn’t be done. the law, and if they use more efficient methods.”
Next day at the afternoon meeting, Martin told her “Maybe that’s true elsewhere,” said Laura, “but I
servers: “If you hear anything about new standard times know my restaurant, my kitchen staff, my servers, and
and methods for serving food and drinks, don’t pay any my guests, and I know we can’t make fourteen minutes,
attention. As you know, we have all committed ourselves even with these new methods they want us to use. Things
to getting the entrées to guests within eighteen minutes can only be done so fast.”
of taking their orders, but our average is sixteen minutes.
“Martin, call a meeting of your staff, explain that the
We’ve been averaging sixteen for all the years I’ve been
new standard times will be met, teach your people
here, and our comment-card results on promptness are
the new methods, stick to managing your unit, and leave
excellent. Because you are all terrific at your jobs, I’d say
methods and times to the Work Methods and Standards
fifteen minutes is the absolute best we could do. But
Department. That’s what we pay you for, and that’s what
those bozos at headquarters say the new standard is all
we pay them for.”
entrées to guests within fourteen minutes of taking the
order.” The servers looked at each other with disbelief, Martin tried her best, but her restaurant knew how
then they started to laugh. she felt about the situation. The servers at this South
Carolina Happy’s Restaurant failed to meet the new
“And they also think we can have the drinks on the
work standards, and the head of the Work Methods
tables within three minutes of first guest contact.” The
and Standards Department blamed Laura Martin. He re-
servers just rolled their eyes and smiled. “Don’t worry,”
commended that new talent should be located for her
said Laura Martin. “I’ll straighten this out in a hurry.”
position.
Martin sent her boss an e-mail telling him that the new
standards had to be a mistake because they were entirely
1. What is the problem here?
unrealistic.
2. Under what circumstances can such “by the minute”
Her boss soon called her and straightened her out in a
standards be made to work?
hurry: “Laura, the new standards will go into effect to-
morrow. Work Methods has achieved improved results 3. How would you determine service standards at your
in several of our other chains already, and now all Hap- restaurant?
py’s branches must conform. Sure, servers always resist

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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
434 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

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1
Wyckoff, D. D. 1984. New tools for achieving service quality. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant NOTES
Administration Quarterly, 24 (6), 156.
2
For a taxonomy of service standards, see Blind, K. 2006. A taxonomy of standards in the
service sector: Theoretical discussion and empirical test. The Service Industries Journal, 26,
397–420.
3
Prokesch, S. E. 1995. Competing on customer service: An interview with British Airways’
Sir Colin Marshall. Harvard Business Review, 73 (6), 101–112.
4
Morgan, I., & Rao, J. 2002. Aligning service strategy through super-measure management.
Academy of Management Executive, 16 (4), 121–131.
5
Tisch, J. M. 2004. The Power of We. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
6
For a thorough review of advantages and disadvantages of service guarantees, see
Hogreve, J., & Gremler, D. D. 2009. Twenty years of service guarantee research: A synthesis.
Journal of Service Research, 11, 322–343.
7
Tax, S. S., & Brown, S. W. 1998. Recovering and learning from service failure. Sloan Man-
agement Review, 39 (3), 75.
8
Fabien, L. 2005. Design and implementation of a service guarantee. The Journal of Services
Marketing, 19, 33–38.
9
Hart, C. W. L. 1988. The power of unconditional service guarantees. Harvard Business
Review, 66 (4), 54–62.
10
Hocutt, M. A., & Bowers, M. R. 2005. The impact of service guarantees on consumer
responses in the hotel industry. Journal of Hospitality & Leisure Marketing, 31 (1), 5–23.
11
Hart, 1988.
12
Blodgett, J. G., Granbois, D. G., & Walters, R. G. 1993. The effects of perceived justice com-
plainants’ negative word-of-mouth behavior and repatronage intentions. Journal of Retailing,
69, 399–428.
13
Bartkus, K. R., Howell, R. D., Hills, S. B., & Blackham, J. 2009. The quality of guest
comment cards: An empirical study of U.S. lodging chains. Journal of Travel Research, 48,
162–176.
14
http://www.westinnandsuites.com/guest-comments/index.cfm

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
436 Section 3 The Hospitality Service Delivery System

15
Tax & Brown, 1998, p. 76.
16
Ross, J. R. 2006. BD’s chain solicits guest feedback with electronic comment cards. Nation’s
Restaurant News, May 8, p. 26.
17
Petrick, J. F., Tonner, C., & Quinn, C. 2006. The utilization of critical incident technique to
examine cruise passenger’ repurchase intentions. Journal of Travel Research, 44 (3), 273–280.
18
For a discussion of these alternative measures, see Ladhari, R. 2008. Alternative measures of
service quality: A review. Managing Service Quality, 18 (1), 65–86; and Hudson, S., Hudson,
P., & Miller, G. A. 2004. The measurement of service quality in the tour operating sector:
A methodological comparison. Journal of Travel Research, 42, 305–312.
19
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. 1988. SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale
for measuring consumer perception of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64, 12–40; Hospi-
tality applications of SERVQUAL may be found in Knutson, B., Stevens, P., & Patton, M.
1995. DINESERV: Measuring service quality in quick service, casual/theme, and fine din-
ing restaurants. Journal of Hospitality and Leisure Marketing, 3 (2), 35–44; Knutson, B.,
Stevens, P., Wullaert, C., Patton, M., & Yokoyama, F. 1991. LODGSERV: A service quality
index for the lodging industry. Hospitality Research Journal, 14, 277–284; and Lee, Y. L., &
Hing, N. 1995. Measuring quality in restaurant operations: An application of the SERVQUAL
instrument. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 3, 293–310.
20
Santos, J. 2003. E-service quality: A model of virtual service quality dimensions. Managing
Service Quality, 13, 233–246.
21
Miles, L. 1993. Rise of the mystery shopper. Marketing (March), 19. See also Morrall, K.
1994. Mystery shopping tests service and compliance. Bank Marketing (February), 13.
22
Ford, R. C., Latham, G. P., & Lennox, G. In press. Mystery shoppers: A new tool for coach-
ing employee performance improvement. Organizational Dynamics.

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Section 3 Chapter 12 Measuring and Managing Service Delivery

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Section 3 Chapter 12 Measuring and Managing Service Delivery

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C H A P T E R 12

Measuring and Managing

Good isn’t good enough.

Success is never final.

KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

process strategies job performance standards comment cards

TECHNIQUES AND METHODS FOR

Rusty Pelican Standards

The Rusty Pelican res-

Photo by John Meyer. Used with permission by the Rusty Pelican.

F I G U R E 1 2 - 1 The Service Standards at the Rusty Pelican

Approach the table and seat the guests:

Measures of Service Quality

Use Many Measures or Just One Super Measure?

TAB LE 12 -1 Tech niq ues f or As sessin g Quality Du r i n g t h e S e r v i c e Ex p e r i e n c e

Employee • Employees have first-hand knowledge of • Objective observation requires specialized

Planning as described in Chapter 10 establishes a range of standards before and during

Job Performance Standards

Managerial Observation of the Delivery Process

purposes” to eliminate the observation bias by making it uncertain as to when manage-

Employee Assessment of Guest Experiences

The Service Guarantee

Organizational Advantages of Guarantees

JetBlue’s Customer Bill

Potential Disadvantages of Service Guarantees

Asking Guests the Right Questions

Informal Queries by Employees

Formal Inquiries by Employees

Structured Inquiries by Professional or Trained Interviewers

MEASURING SERVICE QUALITY

TA BLE 12 - 3 T e chn i qu es f or A ssess ing Q uality Af ter t he Se r vi c e E xp e ri e n ce

TAB LE 12 -3 Tech niq ues f or As sessin g Quality Aft er t he S e r v ice Ex pe r ie nce

Maxie’s Supper Club,

Maxie’s Supper Club’s

about those elements of the guest experience. If an organization tries to differentiate

Toll-Free 800 Numbers

New Technologies for Gathering Feedback

Telephone Surveys and Interviews

FIGURE 1 2 - 2 Instrument for Measuring Guest Perceptions of

1. Belle’s Restaurant has modern-looking equipment.

5. When Belle’s Restaurant promises to do something by a certain time, it does so.

14. The behavior of Belle’s Restaurant employees instills confidence in customers.

18. Belle’s Restaurant gives you individual attention.

Customers Evaluating Service on Their Own

FINDING AND USING THE TECHNIQUE

Your Best Evaluators: The Guests

The Improvement Cycle Continues

Try Before You Buy: The Service Guarantee

Standard Times at Happy’s Restaurant

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