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Quality Assessments Versus Customer Generated Reviews
Hello.
My name's Heather Lishman.
I'm from Lishman Associates, a
hospitality business consultancy
that focuses on quality,
quality matters,
quality succeeds, quality sells.
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Today we're going to
look at if there's
still a role for the state and
industry-wide quality assessments.
Do they mean anything
to the customer
in the era of online reviews,
which offer so much more content?
Without reviews, would there
be a gap in communications
to the guests, or the
possibility that standards
will decrease to the
detriment of the destination?
It's not for us to
debate whether customer
generated reviews or
quality assessments are
a good or bad thing.
But as they inhabit the same
space, we need to make a judgment
as to their effectiveness in
changing perceptions, improving
service, or affecting the
direction and the form hospitality
businesses take to improve.
Our experience focus
on customer generated
reviews and quality assessments,
allows us to highlight
benefits and shortcomings of both.
Today we're going to look at the
arguments in distinct sections,
state and industry quality
assessments, business assessments
and awards, other
quality assessments
as part of entry criteria, and
customer generated reviews.
The presentation looks at the
benefits and challenges for both
the business and the consumer.
It's not known when
the first business
quality assessments took place.
But one suspects that the
Romans or early Greeks
would have had systems in place
to assess the effectiveness
of business or government.
More recently, in the last 100
years, or so, since Henry Ford,
there's been a drive by companies
to compete with their rivals
and become more efficient,
to assess the effectiveness
of their business,
and to demonstrate
to customers and investors that
they're a well-run organization.
And this has seen a growth
in quality schemes for about
every industry imaginable.
From whatever sector of industry
the quality assessment hails,
the objective is the same.
The process strives to
deliver for the business
a significant improvement
in performance.
As more research is carried out by
businesses, universities, auditors,
and trade bodies into
modern working practices,
theories are constantly being
refined, remodeled, or invented
and packaged as the new
best working practices
to follow or to implement.
These new models then surely
lead to new models of measurement
to ensure the effectiveness
of implementation.
For this presentation,
we'll narrow our focus
to the hospitality sector.
For further reference, one could
look more closely at widely used
and universally accepted generic
quality models, such as the EFQM,
the European Foundation
for Quality Management,
or the British Quality Foundation.
