Management perception of service quality in the hospitality industry

2.1.3
 
Service Quality 
The nature of service is defined as being an activity which involves a product or a good 
and is provided as a solution to meet a customer’s demand and that quality is the result 
of being satisfied or not after having evaluated if a service as well as the service delivery 
met the expectations of a customer. 
Nevertheless, this is deemed to be perception of the person receiving the service and 
the quality then depends if the service met the needs, wants and expectations of that 
specific customers. Within this story, service quality is seen as the total assessment of 
how well a service provided meets the expectations of the customer. (Zeithaml, Berry 
& Parasuraman 1988, 35) & (Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry, 1988, 15) 
Service quality for businesses is no different than it is for the customer. However the 
use is different. Service quality is used more as an instrument of measurement of 
performance relating to the expectations of customers. For customers service quality is 
the difference between what is wanted, needed expected and the actual service.

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This in turn results in customer satisfaction or not and it’s is this satisfaction or not 
which determines service quality for business as perceived by from the customer. The 
fact that customers are getting satisfied or not by the services provided determines how 
well business is performing as perceived by the customer and this information is used 
to improve services, identify problems and better assess customer satisfaction. 
In light of the many statements on the subject, an own definition of service quality is 
proposed, namely; service quality is the result of relationship between customer 
expectations which are derived prior to service delivery versus customer experience 
which occurs service delivery which is highly dependable on the performance, attitude 
and behaviour of a contact employee guided by the involvement of management in 
terms of trainings, motivations, leadership and commitment. 
The reason why the proposed definition of service quality involves a managerial 
component is because the fact that one this study revolves around managerial 
involvement in managing service quality as well as the perspective of the open systems 
view of service operations, seen as figure 2
,
which shows operational management’s 
functions and responsibilities in relation to the total service experience. 
Figure 2. Open-systems view of service operations. (Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons, 
1994, 32) 

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As is seen in figure 2, management has a direct effect on the delivery of service 
through trainings, empowerment and attitude on service staff and it’s these service 
staff which dictate the outcome of the service delivery hence showing the importance 
of operations management indirect role in service quality.