Question

Develop 2 soft and 2 hard standards for any aspect of the service offered by hotel and restaurant? (Subject: service marketing)

Answer 1

Two hard and soft standards of service offered by restaurants:

Soft standards: soft standards are those which are not easily available and they can be collected only by talking to the customers or the employees. Soft measures help in getting feedbacks which helps in improving the customer satisfaction.

Following are the possible techniques of soft standards and measures:

• Analyzing the customer complaints.
• Panel’s advice and feedback on service improvement.
• Group interviews conducted separately for both the customers and the employees to study issues relating to quality of service offered.
• Surveys taken from the guests who come to the hotels.
• Surveys conducted among the employees to know their perceptions relating to quality of service offered to the customers.
• Collecting data relating to service like time taken for delivering the orders placed by the customers, failure rates etc.
• Considering the market as a whole and comparing the restaurant’s performance with its competitors.

Hard standards: hard standards are those activities that are easily measurable through audits.

These measures can include examples like how many calls of the customers were abandoned when they were on hold, how much time the customer had to wait in line for the stage of delivery, the temperature of a particular food item offered etc.

Techniques for hard standards and measures:

• Use of control charts to display the time of performance in line with the quality standards.
• Fishbone charts used by the hotel managers to understand the reasons for specific problems like reason for delay in delivery of service, quality of food offered etc.
• Service quality indexes to measure of service quality in line with the quality desired by the customers.