Quality Management in Hospitality: Critical Components Explained!

Quality Management in Hospitality Industry

When it comes to quality management in the hospitality industry, the only rule to win is consistently delivering the highest quality services to the customer. And maintaining the service quality helps gain a competitive advantage over others in the industry. If you want to maintain consistent excellent services, you must understand the hospitality quality’s critical components and train your staff accordingly.

Before we look at the components, let’s understand the concept of service quality.

Service quality is generally evaluated based on customer expectations. If your service is fulfilling and exceeding the customer expectations, they are often considered of top quality. In simple words, service quality is what customer receives and happily pays for. 

The businesses continuously try to bridge the gap between the expected service and the service provided to attain service excellence. It often requires them to invest in employee training on quality service standards. 

“People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”

Hence, hospitality quality revolves around the customer experience. 

As we already discussed above, training plays a crucial role in preparing your staff to deliver excellent customer service. But to train them right, you must dig deeper into service quality components to create the right training programs.

Quality Components in Hospitality Industry

1. Functional Quality

It refers to how service quality is delivered to the customer.

2. Technical Quality

It refers to what is delivered to the customer.

Based on these two critical aspects, you can design and develop the training programs to make your staff more competent for their duties. You can also utilize advanced training management software to provide flexible training programs to your workforce, ensuring minimal impact on productivity. But the quest for excellence doesn’t end here.

Key Elements of Quality Management in the Hospitality Industry

1. Continuous Improvements

Any business must continuously improve their product’s or process quality – and the hospitality industry is no different. The only difference is it requires improvements in service quality. It would be best if they emphasize better quality services, they are likely to build a loyal customer base. It will drive more value to their business in terms of a long-term relationship with their customers. 

Continuous improvements often reflect your business’s commitment to quality and best practices, establishing you as a reliable and trustworthy brand. Most importantly, quality services give your customers a reason to come back.

Continuous improvements take the quality standards to a better and higher level and demonstrate that business is growing. You can utilize quality management solution to identify the key areas that require improvement to plan and implement changes effectively. Since quality and progress are consistent processes, make sure the quality management system for the hospitality industry you choose helps you to establish a closed-loop process that ensures regular improvements.

2. Customer Relationship Management

In the hospitality industry, retaining existing customers and expanding business horizons is of supreme importance. Hotels often introduce loyalty programs and other exclusive offers to capture their customers’ attention while working towards improving customer experience through personalized services and much more. This implies that customer relationship management isn’t as easy as it sounds. Even when they offer so many exclusive benefits, discounts, and offers, they fail to maintain customer relationships for the long term.

One of the primary reasons is not handling customer complaints efficiently. After-all, complaints denote something negative, especially in the hospitality industry. This is what exactly needs to be changed. Considering complaints as an opportunity to improve can help the hospitality industry make significant improvements that can impress their customers. A change in perspective can lead to a world of difference in your service quality.

You can utilize a cloud-based complaints management system to track, manage, and resolve customer complaints effectively. It also ensures a timely response to the customers, making them feel heard and valued. You can also integrate complaints management software with can integrated the complaints management system with existing quality systems to resolve all the service quality problems. In the end – “What we need is a mindset shift that will make us relevant to today’s consumers, a mindset shift from telling to selling to building relationships.” Only then will we get better at customer relationship management.

3. Supplier Quality

The landscape of the hospitality sector’s quality requirements is as diversified as the services and facilities it offers. The industry deals with multiple suppliers for timely availability of the products like toiletries, bedding, crockery, and much more to ensure an excellent customer experience. Managing multiple suppliers can be challenging and time-consuming with traditional quality systems. On the other hand, quality management software makes it easy for you to classify the approved suppliers based on their performance and the quality of the products they deliver.

Hotels need to build quality relationships with their suppliers to stay ahead of competitors, maintain loyalty, and eventually pass off value to their customers. Many advanced supplier quality management systems allow them to communicate with their suppliers more often and strengthen their business relationships while improving together.

Hence, managing and controlling the supplier quality is as essential as managing cost, quality, and service excellence. The quality management software provides the hospitality industry a better control of supplier-related processes and data to make informed business decisions, especially when it comes to selecting the right suppliers since you cannot change suppliers now and then. Right suppliers can really make a world of difference to your service quality.

4. Regular Audits

In addition to financial stability, audits reveal the system’s inconsistencies, processes, product, and service quality that need immediate attention. Maintaining the audits’ frequency is also crucial, especially in an environment like hospitality where a service glitch could ruin customer experience and brand reputation.

Since service audits can help create a memorable customer experience, improve training programs, encourage staff engagement, and increase profitability, you must have the right audit management system in place to manage the end-to-end audit cycle in a compliant and timely manner. The software also leverages the potential of advanced reporting and analytics to analyze audit trends. You can also follow up on the audit observations and recommendations by using the alert and notifications feature.  

Are you still in doubt about the potential of regular audits for hospitality quality management? If yes, you are losing many improvement opportunities. You should realize that audits are the tools that drive the culture of continuous improvements, identifying loopholes, and improving the quality of your service to a whole new level.

5. Quality Documentation

With the recent revolutions of technology, the hospitality industry is also shifting towards the paperless way of doing business by adopting an electronic document management system. The software enables companies in the hospitality sector to record, maintain, store, and share information comprehensively while maintaining security through role-based access and password authentication. It brings good news for customers as well since it means more confidentiality for their information as well.

The next-generation document management software is specifically designed for hotels to streamline their document-related workflows. It also provides them with better control of data collected to ensure flawless operations, data compliance, and a significant reduction in costs.

The hotels also need not worry about the storage limitations with the new cloud-based document management system that can be scaled with their growing needs—leverage technological solutions to gain a sustainable competitive advantage over others.

Shift your focus to all the critical dimensions if you really want to build a culture of quality and excellence. 

To take a holistic approach to hospitality quality management, an enterprise quality management software like Qualityze can help. It prepares you for the competitive challenges on the horizon while enabling you to resolve traditional quality issues simply and straightforwardly.

Built on the most powerful and secure cloud platform, i.e., Salesforce.com, Qualityze comes with an intuitive interface and easy-to-configure workflows to standardize quality processes as per the industry best practices. It simplifies the regulatory reporting and submissions with pre-defined templates. You can leverage its truly unique features to stay compliant with applicable regulatory standards.

To gain more insights about Qualityze EQMS Suite for Hospitality Industry, you can get in touch with our customer success team on 1-877-207-8616 or email at info@qualityze.com, and we will be right there for you. We deliver smarter quality solutions to transform your QMS into Quality Decision Making Engine

You can also request a free demo right now by clicking here.