Characteristics of Service Quality

Service Quality has certain characteristics. Please chose four (4) characteristics and briefly discuss each of them. Service quality is to meet and exceed customer’s needs and requirement in term of the quality in the actual service delivered to the expected service performance.

Four characteristics of service quality are:

1.       Typically intangible: Once the service has been provided, there is no evidence to show the ‘service’. For example, a door man opens doors for hotel guest, there is no evidence of proof for his service, or to say his service is intangible. Contrary to this, a flower girl sells Roses to the hotel guest, the flower is the evidence of proof (a good), which is tangible. Thus, it is hard to evaluate the service after purchasing.

2.       Unable to store: Service is not like goods; service cannot be stored to meet up to the changes in customer’s demand, while goods like cars, can be stored to meet customer demand in future. For instance, a teacher’s advice to his students, the advice and the teacher’s time for giving advice cannot be stored like goods.

3.       Heterogeneity: Or in other word – variation. Service is not a good made by machine, which will result in almost zero defects or nil variability. Service is highly flexible and variable. Different labour input, or simply says, different employee performs differently from the other. For example, setting is a restaurant: Employee A may be prefer to seat his customer and provide a glass of cold water before hands on the menu for his customer to place order, but Employee B may thought he himself given the best service when he can seat his customer and taking order directly and serving his customer with cold drink afterwards. Either way, they both think they give their best service, and the manager also agreed with them both. This scenario implies that it is hard to be measure service quality through conventional quality standard.

4.       Perishability: It refers to the duration of the service provided to the customer, which the duration is vanish-able and have a definite period. For example, the cold drink served to customer A, once served and drank by the customer, the drink vanished once the customer drank it,  that particular drink from that same glass cannot be serve to the other customer again at the same time.  Service also have definite period, if one customer did not request and consume the service at the time given, it will not be performed. 

"Customer Care," a 20x30-inch inspirational color poster photograph of two hands cradling a rose, created by the 31st Communications Squadron (CS), Visual Information, Aviano Air Base (AB), Italy. Subtitle:"Customer care must be nurtured from beginning to end." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Barriers to TQM Implementation

road_block.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 6 barriers to TQM implemantation are as follow:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose. In succession of TQM, a predetermined purpose or objective is very important not only to established but to make sure all members of the organization (the stakeholders, top managers and ground staff) were acknowledged about the objective so that everyone would have the same goal to work for. If the purpose or objective of the TQM Implemantation in an organization is not constant, the mission to achieve by the members is vague, no standard or process to indicate at what level the goods should be produced and the service to be provided and wastages, errors or delays would likely to occur at the production period. Thus, it is far from possible to achieve total quality.

2.Lack of a holistic (yang menyeluruh) view of quality. Meaning to say that the organization focus only on certain sector and neglect on others in quality management process or implementaion of total quality. For example,quality is commonly known as goods or certain features that met customers' needs. Wiith producing the goods of that certain features, the customer is happy and thus the quality, which will generate more profit to the organization. In this case, the quality is only focus on the product, the sales department may be proud of the numbers of sales they made. But the human resource department may face the music due to workers at the production line complains of long working hours, low wages and benefits and so on. In this case, in the same organization, the sales department achieved its quality indicator but the human resource is not. if this situation prolonged, the company would loses its workers and thus lowering production and profit, lastly facing the doomday.  

3.Lack of alignment between components of organization; not working as a system. Refers to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge, a system involved the suppliers, producers (management and the staff) and customers or recepients of goods and services. In order to achieve total quality, the organization should understand the process involving the system and how to system works together to achieve the aim of the system. Lack of alignment between components of organization, would lead to the fall of an organization, as if a three-legged stool, cut one leg short, the stool would tip and fall. A good system is in which the management would select the supplier and working on long-term relationship with the supplier to ensure the supplier provide the best supply at the most reasonable price, getting the best supply, the staff should also be train on how to use the machinery to produce the best products, the customers are also educated on the products usage and encouraged to giving feedbacks on the products, and the management should at all time monitoring the process of the system.

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4.Lack of management commitment, which may happened of various causes. For example, the term of TQM Implementation is short in the organization, the management are not taught of the implementation, how is TQm implemented, lack of resources or fund to implement TQM. Of all the reasons, the management might thought of 'to hold' their efforts in TQM implementation till the day the organization is ready to implement TQM, but they do not know that TQM should be implemented since the birth of an organization to ensure the brand of the organization is well trusted and known by its customers.

5.Rewards not linked to performance. To ensure TQM is achieved in an organization, the members would work hard and all wanted to be recognised and appreciate of their efforts. Lacks of effective measurement of quality improvement, not recognised by the output but seniority and level would surely demotivate the workers. Hence, lowered their spirit and faith in implementing TQM in the organization.

6.Regarded as an overtime program. Resulted from the lack of exposure to the members of the organization and education on the implementation of TQM in an organization. TQM is just one of the programme of the organization, but not the main aim of the organization, it is not regarded as one of the main objectives of the organization. Hence, the members of the organization would pay less attention to it and the implementation of TQm face its constraint to succeed. 

Total Quality Management (TQM) in Public Sector in Malaysia

There are five basic concepts of implementing Total Quality Management (TQM) in the public sector in Malaysia. The concepts are:

1. Meeting customers’ requirement

Total quality management is smart management which does not only include producing product with using efficient resource, but it is a continuous management process to produce goods that meet up and exceeds customers’satisfaction. TQM requires the organization to identify their customers, their needs and expectations, and translate those needs and expectations into standards of quality output to be produced. Aimed at customer focused, TQM establish the appropriate processes involved in producing the quality goods and services and implement the process effectively and efficiently in order to meet up and exceeds customers’ expectations.

2. Maintain through prevention 

TQM main aim it to identifyactivities which will cause wastage in the operating process to produce quality goods and services to the customers, through strategic quality planning. It prevents errors and problems from occurring, rather than simply fixing problems or correcting errors. TQM aims on continuous improvement and problem solving to meet up to customer’s requirements. TQM’s important strategy is the 3 Qs, which are quality planning quality assurance and quality control. These 3 Qs are the prevention technique which will ensure the goods and services produced are in conformance with the needs and requirements of the customers. For example, quality planning is the early stage of error-prevention. Through careful planning, customers of all categories are identified, their needs are recognized, the process to produce the goods are determined, and a set of process controls are designed to ensure that quality can be achieved through the operational activities.

3.Standard of performance is zero defect

As TQM aims at doing things right the first time, all the time, it targeted at providing customers to their full satisfaction by producing defect-free goods and error-free services that conform to the expectations of the customers.

4. Cost of quality is non-conformance of standards

In order to produce goods and services efficiently, TQM always focuses on control of the cost of quality. Quality planning plays an important roles at controlling cost, as at his stage, all cost involved in producing the quality goods and services are estimated and well-planned, any cost incurred as a result of wastage of resources, manufactured of low quality goods, errors at servicing or work or non-value added activities are avoided. Extra cost incurred which does not as predetermined in quality planning, could be reduced by prevention and improving work processes. Strategic planning will also ensure the cost incurred in the process of producing goods, are acknowledged to the production team and prevent unnecessary wastage of resources which will increase the cost of production. Cost of quality incurred is seen as non-conformance to the quality standard. Let say, If a book publishing company targeting at publishing quality storybooks for public libraries that each book contained of 100 stories in it, and estimated each book will cost less than RM 5 in the market, and make a profit of RM 2 out of each book, the publishing or production should plan the type of paper use, ink and numbers of coloured pictured used in each book to ensure the cost of production will be less than or equal to RM 3. That’s standard of total quality. If the production cost more than the estimated RM 3, and the company have to raise the price of the book, customers would not be happy, and that’s not total quality. Arrays in cost of quality are seen as non-conformance to the predetermined total quality standard.

5. Whole work is a process

TQM involved not only the goods produced, but also the people who produce the goods and services, the materials, environment and the work system itself. And TQM not only aimed at meeting customer’s expectations, but it aimed at exceeding them. Organization which practiced TQM like public organizations, implanted quality culture in the work process. The organization recognizes the whole organization as a system, and as a system, the organization has a lot of interacting parts in it. These interacting parts or work which involved everyone in the organization is called process. It affects one and another and it has a chain reaction throughout the system. TQM focus not only on one part of the system or organization, but it focused on the whole system, to optimize the output of the whole system and organization and to achieve total quality output. As TQM looking at the whole system, or organization, the actions of everyone in it will definitely affecting the outcome of the quality process in delivering quality service and goods to the customers. 

"Quality", "Quality Control" and "Total Quality"

Define "Quality", "Quality Control" and "Total Quality":

Quality refers to the standard of end-product or services provided has exceed the customer's expectation. In which the product offered or services provided is defect-free or error-free; the term of use for such products / services is long (tahan lama) and meet up to the requirement of the customers.

Quality Control is a process to ensure that the products are defect-free or error-free and has meet up to or exceed the expectation of the customers. Generally, QC involves 3 steps: evaluation of actual quality of the product manufactured, comparison of the actual products to the predetermined standards; and resolving the differences between the actual products and the predetermined standards. 

 

Total Quality refers not only to the quality of the product itself, but it covered all of the organization in terms of its approaches, policy, procedures, people, environment and process, which aimed to meet and exceed the customer's expectation.

Qualities (Photo credit: kool_skatkat)