Founded in 1941, BMR was Canada’s one of most popular ski resort. As the sport gained in popularity, BMR has expanded and modernized and in the 1980s the company added a year round four-star resort hotel and conference Centre, a condominium development and the Monterra golf course. By 1999 it was a four-season resort. However, winter sports, skiing and snowboarding, were still its dominant activities, accounting for approximately 65 pc of total revenue.
Blue mountain resort enjoyed very good times during the 1980s. However, the focus had been revenue growth and facility expansion. They began to focus on enhanced service and ignored the fundamental aspects of good operations necessary for high levels of quality service. Although the company had been profitable, it began to develop the reputation for long lineups and poor service. It seemed like BMR was trying to achieve high levels of service quality without adequate process and systems.
In 1990,Gordan canning decided to survey the employee’s satisfaction and the results indicated problems with morale. The issues that came up during the course of the meetings indicated employee concerns about a number of issues ranging from working conditions to frustration concerning service quality levels. As a quality employee produces quality service, it was important that company focuses on fixing employee morale and improve communication, team performance and supervision techniques.
The Term Paper on The Determinants of Service Quality
The determinants of service quality: satisfiers and dissatisfiers Robert Johnston University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Introduction There appear to be five major debates taking place in the service quality area. One debate concerns the similarities and differences between the constructs of service quality and satisfaction (see e. g. Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Bolton and Drew, 1991; Cronin and ...
Fixing service quality issue was not easy task as it was a complicated process and needed a long-term commitment from senior management. Taking that in consideration a consulting company was hired. At the end of two days seminar with senior management team, they considered the future vision of the company, focusing on vision for the organization and values that considered critical for creating supportive corporate culture. They weighted advantages of service oriented culture and potential benefit to the company, its employees and customer and made the commitment to develop service quality philosophy. They came up with vision statement of “ To be the best resort in Canada at exceeding customer expectations”, a value statement – “caring trusting and committed”, and a method – the three rings of perceived quality: basic service or product, support and enhanced service.
After service quality program been introduced in 1991, company undergo through many changes, however management felt that they had been too focused in external services, and the term “customer” needed to be redefined. As a part of the service quality vision statement, customer were defined as internal and external, in order to recognize importance of satisfying the needs of internal stakeholders. With the introduction of service quality program, BMR also started to collect information from customers in order to improve service quality by using benchmarking question on customer survey. With the incentive for employee on higher satisfaction of customer, there was improvement on customer rating.
There was change in company hiring system with objective of matching job demands with employee capabilities. A more structured interview process was developed and front line staffs were invited to participate in some hiring activated to build better teams in allowing those participating to decide on their future team member. Communication within employees and management was improved and employees also coordinated many of successful service quality initiatives. However, during 1993-1994 season, new strategy was adopted to “wow” the customer by exceeding the expectations and begin to focus on enhanced service, however ignored the fundamental aspect of good operations. This concept turned out to be failure and had serious impact on their expenses.
The Term Paper on Southwest Inc Customer Airlines Company
Southwest Airlines The original vision of Herb Kelleher has helped to make Southwest Airlines profitable for over 32 years now. As the company moves forward, they will need to find innovative new ways to retain and increase their customer base, and remain competitive. This paper will discuss the concepts that have made Southwest unique from the start; and how the company can continue to increase ...
As company learned its lesson hard way, BMR initiated Project Review process (exhibit 5) in order to achieve higher customer satisfaction. This approach helped on continuous improvement, supported by cross- functional teams using data analysis and planning techniques. They identified failure points in processes, looking for the root causes of the problem, then making recommendations for corrective action.
To continue the improvement of customer service, SWOP program was also initiated where managers and staff from different functional areas are asked to identify specific areas where they felt an opportunity existed for BMR. Once the reports were completed, several were presented to the executive management team and acted on immediately and others were discounted as not being feasible. However there were three proposals that offered significant opportunities in improving service quality in BMR. They were customer flow, speed of service and information technology.
From my analysis on BMR, I could say that, the world is experiencing service revolution. An organization must continuously improve just to keep up with the competition and to be better than others at exceeding customer expectations. People play a vital role for customer satisfaction, and right people with right process to improve service quality are key for success of an organization. §
