Marketing And Quality Management In Service Firms (Essay Sample)

Marketing and management
Student’s name
Date
Quality management in service firms
Summary
The article present important issues related to service quality so as to achieve maximum customer satisfaction. The model that stands out in supporting quality services to the customers is ERVQUAL. The model proposes some structures and strategies to achieve a form of total quality management (TQM) called total quality service (TQS). The important constructs for achieving TQS in an organization include leadership involvement, organizational culture and employee commitment (Gupta, McDaniel & Kanthi, 2005). This model emphasized on the need of organization to understand customers’ needs and expectation in order to design strategies enhance service quality. This requires organization to access and improve on corporate culture, employee commitment and leadership to achieve best business practices that result in improved quality of services and customer satisfaction.
Criticism
The service industry is growing tremendously due to advancement in information and technology. As mentioned by authors, failure to address changing customer needs negatively affect performance of firm in service industry. Many organizations are failing to achieve competitive advantage due to failure to address service quality issues (Gorla et al., 2010). Additionally, management and improving service quality at all processes of organization can significantly lower the cost and save on resources that is vital for increasing profitability. Failure of management to participate in quality control has devastating effects on service delivery thus lowering customers’ satisfaction that in turn reduce customer loyalty (Kheng et al., 2010). Though TQM programs may apply to both manufacturing and service industry, TQS has unique challenges due to its intangibility necessitating careful identification of factors affecting service delivery. The challenge for utilizing SERQUAL instrument is attributed to difficulty in establishing disparities between service delivered and customer expectation. Establishing the extent to which service meet customer expectations can greatly help in devising means to improve service quality.
Reaction
Having visionary leadership in organization is essential to create best service delivery. This is because the leaders create vision and collaborate with employees in carrying out activities to achieve organization goals. With regard to service quality, I believe having good leaders is essential to developing programs that support attainment of quality services. The leaders help in establishing teamwork among employees that is essential to sharing ideas, talents and skills to enhance creativity and innovation so as to improve on service delivery (Bitner, Ostrom, & Morgan, 2008).
Organization culture further supports TQS in that it allows employees and management to have shared vision and have commitment to achieve common goals. Positive relationship between corporate culture and organizational performance has been established in previous studies (Huey & Zaman Bin Ahmad,2009). The most fundamental part of culture is ability to adapt to rapidly changing business environment so as to achieve competitive advantage in service industry. Culture support participation of everyone in organization improve quality of services. Further...