Quality Management in Service Industry:
Quality management in the service industries has been gaining momentum over the past decade. While much has been researched about quality management in manufacturing, the focus on quality in service industries is more recent. Much of the published literature in the area only dates back to the early 1980s. Examples of these are Chase (1981), Carizon (1987), Haskett et al. (1990), Lovelock (1988), Voss et al. (1985) and Zeithaml et al. (1990). Customers are becoming increasingly critical and vocal, and business can no longer ignore pressure from powerful consumer lobby groups. In a survey of 100 leading UK businesses, chairmen, CEOs and managing directors, the most important issues identified for success in the 1990s were "building longer term relationships with key customers" and " creating a more customer centred culture". To achieve those goals over 90% reported quality and customer satisfaction to be "very important". The report, however, noted the need to go beyond traditional approaches to quality and to adopt a "marketing-led approach to quality management". The ideas being developed in services marketing see quality from a customer perspective and recognise that the only arbiter of quality is the customer. What the customer believes is quality IS quality. This perspective on quality, a market-led approach, is also applicable to manufacturing companies where perspectives on quality have been somewhat blinkered by its production and operations genesis. Quality management programmes require prerequisite changes in management philosophy and organisational culture. Fig. (2-4) illustrates different possible changes that accompany the introduction of total quality service. These changes can be summarised as follows: 1. the focus becomes `external' to the company rather than being organised to meet the `internal' needs of staff, procedures and systems. This requires a shift from focus on what industry needs to what the customer really wants.