Customer Satisfaction Surveys in Seaside Resorts - Servqual?

[Nemain]

Hi guys!

As I am quite unhappy with the way we are conducting customer satisfaction surveys in our seaside resorts in Egypt, I started searching around and found some details about the SERVQUAL method (by Parsuraman etc...) and started to study it a little bit.

Now I am searching for someone who has a practical experience with this system - maybe to warn me? Hopefully to encourage me to further studies in this matter...

By the way - as I am a newbie in this great forum, is there anybody out there working in quality for a hotel ?
I would love to make contact to YOU!

I will attach a short one of the files I found already...

[harry]

Hello Nemain,

Service qualities are perceptions, not tangible and are usually measured by comparison or benchmarking with others.

First you need to know where you stand in the market. It’s good idea to get experience people like your resort manager, PR or Marketing managers to assist you.

Next you need to choose some establishment that you want to benchmark against. It could be the leading resort in your region or country.

The method adopted is called a ‘walk through’ – you literally record your experience as you progress from entering the lobby, check in, use of facilities till check out and then compare with your experience in your own establishment. A scoring system of say 1 to10 points may be used. The difference in score for each parameter or item identifies the ‘service gap’ that exists between you and your target. You may plot these gaps to give you a visual guide or picture on far you are with reference to the target.

Having identified the gap, the next action is to come up with plans and proposals on how you can narrow down these gaps. Experience hoteliers or guests can help you with feedbacks without you being physically there.

You are right to doubt the result of survey questionnaires as everybody will give you feedbacks based on their previous experiences. Some are with reference to resorts of a lower grade than yours and some with reference to resorts of a much higher grade – in other words no uniform benchmark.

Hope these helps.

[Nemain]

Thanks for spending time on an answer - by the way not bad as a way to do a kind of self assessment, extending it later to other people's opinion etc...

My point are 2 different issues:

1. Servqual has been established for service industries & I got already enough material on it to figure out how this system works.
I would highly appreciate to get in contact with someone that tried it.

Strange is somehow that I found many book publications about Servqual, but no one I ask about the system personnaly seems to know it...

Of course it is only one of many possible ways to catch a guest's point of view... just thought it could be a great way - why else there should be so many publications about it?

2. The idea in general was to make surveys concerning a few general points only (thats why Servqual with its 5 dimensions would be suitable); then to monitor the results, decide on which one of the surveyed gaps we want to react and then to conduct specific surveys, figuring out the details that the first "general points" survey could not catch.
Then I could go on with good old Pareto to decide on which details to react first etc...

The main reason for a quite short questionnaire is that people feel annoyed by a big one - resulting in that they do not concentrate & do not give their true opinion. They just quickly mark their way through all these questions in order to get rid of the paper. Not really what we want I guess...
In addition we save administration time as we go into details only in certain areas.

-----
Of course it is true that a questioned customer will reply based on his prior experiences in other resorts (maybe higher or lower standard than our resort) as you say, but also you usually aim for a certain customer group (e.g. divers, business travellers etc.) - and people with similar interests have usually somehow similar expectations...

So - I guess I will continue searching through the web for guys that can give me input about Servqual & at the same time checking for more ideas.

Anyhow - I am dreaming if I think that I could convince my Regional QM to replace our horribly long questionnaire

Greetings,

[Sartaj Bedi]

In Reply to Parent Post by Nemain

Hi guys!

As I am quite unhappy with the way we are conducting customer satisfaction surveys in our seaside resorts in Egypt, I started searching around and found some details about the SERVQUAL method (by Parsuraman etc...) and started to study it a little bit.

Now I am searching for someone who has a practical experience with this system - maybe to warn me? Hopefully to encourage me to further studies in this matter...

By the way - as I am a newbie in this great forum, is there anybody out there working in quality for a hotel ?
I would love to make contact to YOU!

I will attach a short one of the files I found already...

Hi,

I have used SERQUAL principles in our restaurant. Satisfaction is an emotional response. The dimensions of service must be measured against expecation. eg Taste of food may be above expecation, below expectation or met expectation. Questionaire designed on this format will show you that to wow a customer is quite difficult.

You can use the data and do multi variate analysis and find out which variables imapact the guets over all experience. This can then further allow you to infer the resources required to acheieve a superior satisfaction level. Please note that some areas like poor billing will lead to " met expecation" which means that there is no satisfaction and no dissatisfaction.

I hope this helps.