ANTECEDENTS OF SERVICE DELIVERY IN HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

The backbone of Hospitality Industry is Customer Service which cannot be denied. How best these services are rendered determines the success of the business. This study establishes the fact that there are internal and external factors that influence quality of service. These are considered as the two dimensions of the construct. The objective of this paper is to investigate the influences of the undermined internal factors which are non-human such as “Standards”, “Systems”, “Process”, “Procedures” and “tools” (one part of the construct – Antecedents of service delivery) on service delivery. The external factors of ServQual (the other part of the construct) are well studied for its influence on customer satisfaction by many researchers. A survey was conducted with 80 functional executives using a wellstructured questionnaire based on the internal factors. The result of the study focuses on the antecedents and its role in achieving service quality. These factors will definitely help the hotel managers to improve service delivery from the grass root level. This paper also tries to prove the fact that though ServQual scale is very useful, it needs to be modified and adapted for specific service segments within which it is used. The various service delivery antecedents: standards, procedures, process, systems and tools have to be applied in the hospitality perspective at various angles to study the actual performance on set standards