to maintain patronage. To meet the high demands of customers, it is imperative that the service industry (hotels) tailors their services to the changing needs and lifestyles of customers. Petzer et al (2009) highlights the fact that there is room for improvement in customer retention in the hotel industry in South Africa. There are several determinants shown to have an impact on customer retention. They are building relationships with customers, compatibility management, customer defection, identification of service failures and service recovery (Blattberg et al 2001, Petzer et al 2009). South African businesses have enjoyed an increased appreciation and application of Business Management and its accompanying principles.
The hospitality industry cannot afford to let the opportunity disappear into the sunset and ignore the refinement of processes, business optimisation, waste reduction, operations reengineering and customer focus brought about by introducing total quality management (TQM) (Dayton 2003). Over the last two decades TQM has become a world wide phenomenon with organisations eager to climb on the bandwagon to extrapolate competitive advantage through the implementation of TQM principles (Tersiovski, 2006).
Introducing TQM in hotels provides managers the room to think strategically about their organisation, its business position, how it can gain sustainable competitive advantage and how its business management strategy can be implemented and executed strategically. The latter provides the
38 Management Today | January 2012
basis for ensuring the smooth running of operations and ultimately, ensuring guests have a memorable experience at a particular establishment. As a consequence, determining the linkage between TQM principles and customer retention within the service industry, particularly hotels, is necessary to provide both theoretical and practical insights that contribute to their goals to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
The aim of this section on TQM is to identify the key principles for implementing and measuring a TQM process with particular reference to hotels. Hill & Jones (1995) describe TQM as a management philosophy that focuses on improving the quality of a company’s products and services and stresses that all company operations should be oriented toward this goal. The British Quality Association (BQA), in an attempt to clarify TQM, adopted a descriptive approach by identifying common themes indicative of the TQM process. The themes are customer orientation, culture of excellence, removal of performance barriers, teamwork, training, and employee participation (Soltani, 2008).
Discussion of results The empirical results show that only one of the hotels surveyed in the Garden Route follows a TQM program although all the hotel managers are familiar with TQM. All the hotels surveyed in the Garden Route place high emphases on quality customer service however; all hotel managers (100%) agreed that a well–structured TQM system can improve their customer service. Research data indicates that
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