Management perception of service quality in the hospitality industry

 

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1
 
Introduction 
1.1
 
Background information to this Study 
Service Quality Management has been a popular topic throughout the years of my 
study career. It has continiously showed up in every subject or theme within my studies 
on the hospitality industry. Starting from basic demand versus supply theory to 
organizational theory as well as operations management and customer relationship 
management. There must have been a reason for this and the reason is that when the 
customer is king it means customer satisfaction is a priority and to some degree 
managing the quality of the service your provide is managing customer satisfaction. But 
this in turbn is based on own perception and understanding. 
The actual reason of choice of this topic for this thesis came through a previous course 
I had taken called Hotel Business Operaitons Management and it’s within this cource 
where operations management was defined and the importance of service quality 
became clear. Operations management is about the management of the processes that 
produce or deliver goods and services, and all decisions made following this purpose
affect the quantity of sales by the shape and size of products as well the profitability 
through prices and the quality of products and services given. 
In one way the basis of these decisions dictate the quality of the products and services 
provided since these decisions are done in order to improve performance, profitability 
and customer satisfaction and therefor links the importance of quality in the continious 
process of improving your service delivery. Yett it all depends on what management 
deems more important then others. For example, management could make cost a 
priority instead of quality of service. Or management could put more emphesis on 
customer or client satisfaction, which in one way includes service quality. So 
managerial decision depend on the priority of the issues at hand, be it costs, client 
satisfaction or service quality. 
Harris (1989, 2) states that management should never forget about other objectives as 
the measurement of managerial effectiveness depends on the getting the right balance 

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in priority and objectives to effectively improve the business performance. Because of 
this management cannot deem one issue to have more priority over the other, but 
must find the right balance and structure and distribute available resources evenly to 
reach departmental or organizational objectives.
This interest lead to the choosing of managing service quality as the main topic of this 
thesis and will be further linked to a managerial problem and structured into a research 
issue or problem definition in a later paragraph within this chapter. 
Personally, further understanding this topic would help my professional career as to 
acting as a reminder of pitfalls in management and the importance of not loosing focus 
what’s important, management of service moments and customer interaction.