Importance Factors of Foreign Guests Perceptions on SMEs Hotel's Service in Malaysia

Abstract

Industry people and writers in the prevalent media tend to use the terms satisfaction and quality reciprocally, but scholars have endeavoured to be more accurate about the meanings and measurement of the two notions, resulting in significant deliberation by many parties from different backgrounds and understandings. Despite the fact that they have communal in shared meaning, satisfaction is often viewed as a broader theory, while service quality evaluation emphases precisely on dimensions of service. Service quality is a focused evaluation that reveals every element in service as based on the customer's perception. As for satisfaction, it is more comprehensive: resulted from every perception by the customer towards service quality, product quality and price offered by the service providers including situational factors and personal factors that circled the whole perception. The designed survey was simple which to look upon the response of foreign guest towards the importance elements that need to be prepared and delivered by the SMEs hotel throughout their stay. All features in the selected tested Importance Factors are important criteria to meet the research objective. In addition, a wide coverage of foreign guests have been participated as our samples to represent and generalize the study as a future reference. All respondents have successfully given their cooperation to this research and made the set of survey questions usable. A simple descriptive analysis was run for the purpose of result presentation to discover the factors that need to be taken care of and validated by respective agencies and society.

Keywords: Importance factorsservice qualitySMEs hotelsMalaysia

Introduction

The service sector is now to be the key element factor in defining economy’s triumph. Up to 2020, most of the countries are very much depending upon this sector. Services cover a huge variety of complex activities, making them difficult to define. The word service was originally associated with the work that servants did for their masters. In time, the term came to be defined more broadly as “the action of serving, helping or benefiting; conduct tending to the welfare or advantage of another (Brown, 2002 as cited in Wirtz & Lovelock, 2018, p, 14). According to Wirtz and Lovelock (2018), services is defined as economic activities between two parties, implying an exchange of value between the seller and the buyer in the market place. We describe services as performances that are most commonly time-based. They emphasize that purchasers buy services for desired results. In fact, many firms explicitly market their services as “solutions” to the needs of potential customers who expect to obtain value from their service purchases in exchange for their money, time and effort. This value comes from access to a variety of value-creating elements rather than transfer of ownership. Ghobadian et al. (1994) claimed that service quality is a condition to service success in today's challenging competition amongst the service providers. This has become the focal point and treated as an obligation to every service owner or practitioner. As to remain succeed and competence in the industry, the service providers need to ensure that the provision of quality is to meet the customer expectation in which it will lead to customers satisfaction and company’s profit making. According to Antony et al. (2004) service quality includes the concept of meeting and exceeding the expectations of the customer and unless these expectations are exceeded, customers will regard the service as mere ordinary or inferior. Customers hold service expectations based on many principles, such as experiences, recommendations, publicity, testimonials in which most of the customers compare the perceived service that they have encountered with the expected service before they patronizing any. Ingram and McDonnell (1996) state that service quality is a core element to be focused in service industry as it has become the most highlighted point in any business engagement based on its effect towards customer satisfaction, customer feedback and customer response.

The individual relationships between service productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability are complex. When examining the individual links, one can see that, everything being equal, higher customer satisfaction should improve the bottom line through higher repeat purchase, share of wallets and referrals. Likewise, higher productivity should lead to higher profitability as costs are reduced. Meanwhile, the relationship between productivity and customer satisfaction is more complex. There is the general notion of a service productivity – customer satisfaction trade-off. However, although the relationships between productivity, service quality and profitability can conflict, there are still ways where productivity gains and customer satisfaction are aligned (Wirtz & Lovelock, 2018).

Satisfaction denotes to the consumers state of being satisfactorily compensated in buying process for the cost that has been paid. Oliver (1997) defines satisfaction as the buyers' completion response. It is a decision of accepting the product or service delivered meets the pleasurable level of consumption. Zeithaml and Bitner (2003) interpret Oliver's description of satisfaction as a customer's likability towards every successful service delivered. Dissatisfaction of customers will only happened once the service quality is failed to achieve due to the failure in service delivery or any damage in product service.

Satisfaction is significantly found to be changed over time and become vigorous due to various factors (Fournier & Mick, 1999). The customer satisfaction is subject to the perception of product or service feature quality standard, customers' emotional responses and customers’ attributions.

Problem Statement

It is widely acknowledged that the survival of hotels in the current state of competition where most hotels possess similar luxurious physical facilities depends to a greater extent on the delivery of service quality that delights guests. Customer-defined standards and measures of service quality can be grouped into two broad categories: “soft” and “hard”. Soft standards and their measures are those that cannot be easily observed and are typically collected by talking to customers. Soft standards “provide direction, guidance and feedback to employees on how to achieve customer satisfaction and they can be quantified by measuring customer perceptions and beliefs” (Zeithaml et al., 2013, p. 261). Hard standards and measures, in contrast, are typically process activities and outcomes that can be counted, timed or measured. Such measures may include the number of orders that were filled correctly. The time required to complete a specific task and the number of minutes customers had to wait in line at the particular stage in the service delivery (Wirtz & Lovelock, 2018, pp. 454-455). Pallet et al. (2003) argue that quality has to be initiated, visioned, planned, monitored, delivered and sustained. They proposed that quality problems and key human resource issues in hotels can often be solved with a common "People and Quality" strategy which involves placing guest needs in the heart of the whole process; seeking suggestions from staff; developing corporate quality and people philosophy; training and empowering staff; benchmarking and reviewing (Pallet et al., 2003, pp. 349-351.). Al-Alak and Al-taie (2006) argue that service quality should be defined from the guest's perspective, and that it is the perceptions of these guests that really matter, hence, there seems to be a need to study hotel's guest perceptions. Therefore, it is important to indicate the contributing importance factor in determining company success, correct services delivered and customer satisfaction

Research Questions

The research questions for this study are as follows:

• Which contributing importance factor is the most central to be highlighted by SMEs Hotel in Malaysia when delivering their services to foreign tourists?

• What are the important service features need to be highlighted by SMEs Hotel in Malaysia when delivering their services to foreign tourists?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study are outlined as follows:

• To explore the most contributing importance factor to the success of delivering services to foreign guests by SMEs hotel in Malaysia.

• To discuss the importance service features that should be emphasized by SMEs hotel in providing services to foreign guests.

Research Methods

Findings

Conclusion

A good quality SMEs Hotel services arises from the combination of three enabling pillars: Front Office Factor, Room Service Factor and the Restaurant Factor. Therefore, these three pillars represent the important of involvement in ensuring the target objectives of providing and delivering SMEs Hotel foreign guests are successfully achieved. This study has shown a significant impact to the three pillars that their involvement in working together will help the success in delivering quality services that lead into customer satisfaction. Priority should be given to the highly rated factor which is Room Service Factor but in order to become a successful service provider, all three factors are indicated as important to work parallel to achieve company objectives and customer satisfactorily level.

Acknowledgments

This study has been funded by the Universiti Tenaga Nasional Internal Grant (iRMC).

References

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