Management perception of service quality in the hospitality industry

4.2
 
Findings and Issues 
The results and findings that are discussed hereon after are based on interviews held 
with service managers. These interviews were transcribed into data and can be found in 
the attachments as attachment 4 starting from page 56. The themes which emerged 
from the interviews are set out in attachment 5 in the attachments starting at page 85.
Furthermore, the coding sequences were to follow two sequences mainly from axial 
coding to selective coding but other theoretical knowledge suggested to begin with 
open coding and sequence this to axial coding and so on to selective coding to break 
through and find one core concept. 
Table 3. Coding sequence summary. 
Axial 
Selective 
Core Concept 
Relating to service quality 
Service concepts 
Different perceptions and 
defining SQ and different 
perspective towards 
relationship with SQ 
Dissimilarities of 
perceptions of SQ 
Different perception of
service quality 
Multiple sources for 
feedback 
Measurement concepts 
Management of information 
received through numerous 
ways 
for improving service quality 
Different methods of 
measuring 
customer satisfaction 
Staff development 
Development concepts 
The incorporation of service 
with new 
information, data or insights 
to better improve service 
quality 
Improving service quality 

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Table 3. Represents a summary of the coding results mainly showing the axial coding 
to selective coding. 
4.2.1
 
Service Concepts 
The first issue that arose from the results was the vast amount of descriptions that 
were given when the participants where ask to explain how they relate to service quality 
at work. The purpose of this question was to understand whether the interviewee’s 
could explain in their own way how they manage service quality at their establishment. 
Through the coding sequences, one can understand that all the interviewee’s presented 
their own description of how they relate to service quality. Most of the answers where 
shown to relate more to customer service or taking care of the customer. 
In truth this is not a wrong answer; the core of service quality revolves around 
customers however none of the answers actually gave proof of how the interviewee’s 
manage or interact with service quality at work. The factors behind this result could 
either be that the interviewee’s did not understand the question or when they were 
confronted with this question the first concept that came to mind was customer 
service. Whereas customer service is merely one of the two variables within the service 
quality construct of Grönroos (1990, 37) 
Issue number 2 concerned the perspective of each interviewee to service quality; 
mainly what do they think it stands for. 
The answers again proved inconsistent to the question, as no clear description of any 
of the definitions that were given in chapter 2 were realized in any way. 
As the coding results show, only three valid answers were given linking to service 
quality, namely; “meeting expectations during customer service “and “tangibles and 
intangibles”. 

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Within this story, service quality is seen as the total assessment of how well a service 
provided meets the expectations of the customer by the customer. (Zeithaml et al. 
1988, 35) & (Parasuraman et al. 1988, 15)
Interesting that these answers were only given by two of the four participants, these