Service Quality Enhancement Tool - Welcome and Foreword

Enhancing Service Quality in Your Business

Welcome

The delivery of high quality customer service plays an important part in the tourism or visitor experience. Service Quality is generally accepted as an overall appraisal of a service.

Service quality is important to the tourism industry as it is clearly linked to profitability, repeat purchase behaviour, increased willingness to pay higher prices for high-quality services (i.e. greater yield), positive word of mouth and increased customer loyalty.

This tool is an attempt to introduce a new, easy-to-apply training aid via the online environment in order to better accommodate Small to Medium Tourism Enterprises (SMTEs) operational and time-related constraints.

Good luck!

Foreword

The delivery of high quality customer service plays and important part in the tourism experience; however tourism industry leaders acknowledge that training of customer service staff within small to medium tourism enterprises is lacking.

Evaluating the quality of services is more difficult than evaluating the quality of goods, due to the intangible nature of “services” and their variability. This is particularly relevant to tourism enterprises where it is often the experience that is important to the customer.

This tool has been designed by Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) to assist Small to Medium Tourism Enterprises (SMTEs) enhance their customer service. More generally, SMTE operators can use this tool to improve service quality and thus achieve better business outcomes.

A complete copy of the technical report supporting this module, ‘Service Quality Enhancement - Identification, development and evaluation of tools for Small to Medium Tourism Enterprises’, can be downloaded from STCRC’s book shop at http://crctourism.com.au/BookShop/

Generally, research undertaken by STCRC indicates that engagement with the SMTE sector in training and/or business performance improvement activities is difficult. For many SMTEs, training can be afforded a low priority due to a variety of competing demands upon their time and resources.

Service quality tool outline

• There are two (2) brief explanatory Sections that provide a brief ‘scene-setting’
• The tool is a Three Step process supported by a number of activities and supporting attachments that allow users to undertake an easy to interpret, self-paced evaluation
• Each of the Steps and activities is designed to be downloaded and completed at the user’s leisure and there is no formal assessment for each of the activities - there are no wrong or right answers, just individual operational environments
• The completion of all activities is highly recommended and will provide a strong foundation for your Service Quality Enhancement and operational improvement
• The tool is designed to be a ‘self-help’ mechanism for SMTEs that are committed to improving the way they service visitors/guests

Acknowledgements

The Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) acknowledges the contributions of the researchers and authors in the preparation of this tool and the technical report -
Ken Butcher, Beverley Sparks, Grace Pan and Janet McColl-Kennedy.

Griffith University and The University of Queensland provided infrastructure support for the project.

The following members of the Industry Reference Group also contributed to the development of the tool:

• Tourism Queensland
• Restaurant and Caterers Queensland
• Department of Tourism, Racing and Fair Trade
• Tourism Noosa
• Queensland Hotel and Motel Association of Australia

 

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