Why Guest Experience Management Matters in Hotels
Albert BarraSeptember 8, 2018 · 5 min read
Due to the inherently intangible nature of services, the complexity and difficulty involved in assessing their quality are far greater than for product quality, compounded by the inherent subjectivity arising from each guest’s evaluative perception of the performance and delivery of service attributes.
The quality of a hotel’s services must be measured and conceptualised based on the guest’s perception and judgement. Therefore, when discussing the quality of service at a hotel or tourism business, we must refer to it according to the guest’s evaluation criteria, rather than what we expect from it. Only then can we effectively manage services and their quality, raising them to the standard we expect for our hotel.
In “Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: an Assessment of the SERVQUAL Dimensions”, Carman, J.M. (1990) states that the concept of quality has shifted towards the consumer, as I have already published in previous articles. The only criteria that truly matter in evaluating the quality of a service are those established by the guest: subjective or perceived quality.
To measure quality, it is absolutely essential to study, analyse, research and gain knowledge and understanding of guests’ needs, beliefs, trends and perceptions. Therefore, the design of processes and services, their definition and delivery, and their qualitative assessment must correspond to the appreciation, evaluation and definition that tourists make of them. This is the only way we can work to improve the quality of those services and provide sufficient reasons for the outstanding experience our guest consumes, through which we seek to create a sense of satisfaction that, in their judgement, evaluation, experience and feelings, turns them into a close collaborator and a loyal, faithful and frequent purchaser of that experience.
In order to achieve customer loyalty and attract new customers, our hotel needs a quality policy based on the continuous improvement of that quality. If it includes previously established quality patterns and standards, with rigid rules and policies that often hinder the free advancement and improvement of service, constantly holding back the progress and enhancement of the customer experience, we are doing nothing.
In quality, it is the customer experience that matters and adds value; therefore, everything, absolutely everything, must be aligned with that customer’s point of view and frame of reference. Thus, the assessment and evaluation, adjustment, work and improvement of service quality at the hotel must be carried out jointly and in coordination with CRM and internal service marketing, in order to identify and analyse those marketing touchpoints that occur at the hotel in relation to the service delivery process and the benefits perceived by guests, which are key elements of their overall experience. This requires training hotel staff in these techniques and skills, with thorough management and care of moments of truth and guest interactions. The quality of a hotel’s products/services leads to the creation of loyal guests, as those who feel satisfied and whose expectations are exceeded after choosing a hotel are likely to return and recommend and promote it to other potential customers. Investment in the quality/performance/experience of hotel services will translate into greater customer loyalty and a higher number of loyal guests. Measuring service quality is a widely discussed topic in management literature and within tourism; however, progress in determining what should be measured has not been very effective. To address this, most researchers and hoteliers have adopted one of the two so-called “schools” of thought on quality: the European school, represented by the Nordic school (Grönroos), and the North American school (Parasuraman), although the latter has been the most widely used, through the SERVQUAL scale. Both schools are based on the disconfirmation paradigm, in which perceived quality is determined by the differences between expected or desired service—or expectations—and perceptions of the service received. SERVQUAL, which has been the subject of considerable criticism and has been considered unsuitable for operationalising perceived service quality, gave rise to an improved model, SERVPERF, which measures only the performance of the service received rather than the comparison between expectations and perceptions. SERVPERF is considered superior, as it is more appropriate not to incorporate expectations in the measurement of perceived service. Perhaps the closest approach to achieving the level of quality required by the guest, adding the greatest positive value to their experience and achieving the best performance in delivering that service, could be obtained through an analysis that overlays a variety of models assessing the same issue from different angles and characteristics, and using different variables, as we have previously stated. It is from this conversation, this communication—which is ultimately this exchange between service delivery and the guest’s perception of it—that the experience emerges. A conversation in which the service provider conveys “love” can lead to a positive experience, which in turn can awaken a feeling of “love” in the guest, leading to a “marriage” with the hotel, destination or service and making their loyalty everlasting.This article ends here. The archive does not.
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