Service Quality: Insights and Managerial Implications from the Frontier

Service Quality: Insights and Managerial Implications from the Frontier

One of us (Rust) recently gave a lecture to an alumni gathering at Vanderbilt on the topic of Total Quality Management (TQM) and how it was being misapplied (see Kordupleski, Rust, & Zahorik, 1992). The theme was that managers must link internal process quality to the quality perceived by the customer (see also Bolton & Drew, chap. 8, this volume, for an elaboration of these ideas) and that cost reductions through [Page 2]mass layoffs should not be confused with quality improvement, although cost reduction may often be a side benefit of quality improvement. An attendee, a vice president of a major company, objected strenuously, stating that cost reductions through massive layoffs were the true meaning of TQM. He suggested that the professors addressing the gathering should teach their MBA students no more than what companies tell them and that the appropriate role of a professor was to simply be a reporter for the “best practices” of business.

This incident reveals two things: first, that some business people think that academics do not listen to them, and second, that some business people do not want to listen to academics. In this case, the executive's presumption that the professors were ignorant of the business world was wrong. Through the Owen School Center for Services Marketing, we have established close ties to several leading businesses, including AT&T, which has won more Baldrige Awards than any other firm. But the executive was correct in implying that the academic viewpoint and the managerial viewpoint do not meet often enough and that the two worldviews need to be merged for best results.

In this chapter, we seek to merge the academic view with the managerial view. We start from the premise that managers and academics can and should talk to each other. The best academic research has important implications for managers and reveals new insights for managing service quality more effectively. In fact, some of the best academic research is being done by researchers in industry, as may be seen from the sophisticated yet practical chapter by the authors from GTE (Bolton & Drew, chap. 8).

...