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The dining consumer has many choices in all restaurant segments. With years of experience in dining out, that consumer is impatient and sophisticated. If your restaurant isn't providing satisfaction service and value -- the consumer will leave it for another. The determination of what is great service altered over the years. While it once may have been leading restaurateurs, consultants, or even Emily Post guiding an insecure public, today restaurateurs must ask the boss -- the customer -- to define great service. Today, the restaurateur who provides great service and value has a competitive advantage over those operators who do not.
Background
A dozen years ago McCleary and Weaver made the point that to define good service, you had to identify measurable behaviors that mattered.(1) Then Zemke and Albrecht identified systems and strategies for managing service and suggested that service would become increasingly important in competitive strategy.(2) About ten years ago Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry developed a conceptual model of service quality that resulted in a measurement scale called SERVQUAL.(3)
SERVQUAL is an instrument for measuring the gap between the service that consumers think should be provided and what they think actually has been provided. Consumers rated the importance of more than a hundred aspects of service, which the researchers divided into ten categories, or dimensions. The consumers' ratings defined service quality. The researchers then narrowed the items down to 31 and the dimensions down to five (listed in Exhibit 1).(4)
Two of the authors, Knutson and Stevens, drafted LODGSERV to be used in defining and measuring service quality for lodging properties.(5) We used confirmatory factor analysis, as developed by Hunter and Gerbing, to purify the scale and confirm the five at dimensions of service quality.(6)
Further testing showed that ten of the original 36 items didn't contribute to the index. The final version of LODGSERV had 26 items and the same five dimensions as SERVQUAL. As later found with the generic SERVQUAL, reliability is the most important of the five dimensions.(7) Listed in descending order of importance to lodging consumers, the other dimensions are assurance, responsiveness, tangibles, and empathy.(8)
We participated in a group that analyzed the statistical methodology itself, comparing the uses of exploratory versus confirmatory factor analysis in index testing and...