Providing clear guidance for anyone servicing internal or external customers, this book offers a framework for analyzing and managing quality using a comprehensive closed-loop approach. This book cuts through the complexities of the mantra ‘better, cheaper, faster’ (BCF) and offers procedures for the evaluation of customer needs, the determination of performance metrics, and the design of effective customer satisfaction surveys. It details basic statistical techniques and packages the framework, procedures, and methods into a management construct that includes external quality certification systems and internal performance management systems. Importantly, the book also describes how these systems can be implemented in a virtual workplace. This quality management book will be essential to service-oriented firms (financial, government, healthcare, hospitality, etc.), as well as any firm with internal customer service processes such as human resource management, purchasing, and accounting. Professionals at all levels, corporate trainers, and students will welcome this book’s common set of principles and tools, accompanied by many case studies that illustrate how they are applied in various environments.

Does your staff deliver the highest quality service possible? Customers today expect a very high overall level of service in hospitality, tourism, and leisure. Competition in these fields will thus be driven by strategies focusing on quality of service to add value, as opposed to product or price differentiation. Service Quality Management in Hospitality, Tourism, and Leisure highlights concepts and strategies that will improve the delivery of hospitality services, and provides clear and simple explanations of theoretical concepts as well as their practical applications! Practitioners and educators alike will find this book to be invaluable in their businesses and in preparing students for the business world. This essential book provides you with clear, comprehensive explanations of theoretical concepts and methods that will give you the competitive edge in this fast-changing field. Topics covered include: services management marketing operations management human resources management service quality management Service Quality Management in Hospitality, Tourism, and Leisure brings together an array of pertinent materials that will measure and enhance customer satisfaction and help you provide superior hospitality services, and groups them in easy-to-use clusters for quick reference.

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So-called Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is founded on well-known SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and represents one of the most important emerging network infrastructure opportunities. The IBN is the beginning of a new era in the history of networking, where the network itself translates business intentions into appropriate network configurations for all devices. This minimizes manual effort, provides an additional layer of network monitoring, and provides the ability to perform network analytics and take full advantage of machine learning. The centralized, software-defined solution provides process automation and proactive problem solving as well as centralized management of the network infrastructure. With software-based network management, many operations can be performed automatically using intelligent control algorithms (artificial intelligence and machine learning). As a result, network operation costs, application response times and energy consumption are reduced, network reliability and performance are improved, network security and flexibility are enhanced. This will be a benefit for existing networks as well as evolved LTE-based mobile networks, emerging Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud systems, and soon for the future 5G/6G networks. The future networks will reach a whole new level of self-awareness, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-recovery and self-protection. This volume consists of 28 chapters, based on recent research on IBN.The volume is a collection of the most important research for the future intent-based networking deployment provided by different groups of researchers from Ukraine, Germany, Slovak Republic, Switzerland, South Korea, China, Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil, Belarus and Israel. The authors of the chapters from this collection present in depth extended research results in their scientific fields.The presented contents are highly interesting while still being rather practically oriented and straightforward to understand. Herewith we would like to wish all our readers a lot of inspiration by studying of the volume!

Gronroos (international and industrial marketing, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Finland) examines the nature of market-oriented management and analyzes the impact that service- dominated competition has had and will continue to have on management thinking and decision making. He includes practical advice on how to cope with specific situations relative to the consumptive process. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The importance of service and service quality has been growing in the world economy since the late 1970s. Establishing new levels of sophistication and rigor, as well as a broad set of approaches, Service Quality presents the latest research and theory in customer satisfaction and services marketing.

“Great retailers are great at service. No exceptions. This book offers a wealth of insight into delivering excellent retail service.” ---Leonard L. Berry, Distinguished Professor of Marketing, N.B Zale Chair in Retailing and Market Leadership, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University "With a growing understanding of service as a phenomenon and perspective of business and marketing, retailers are increasingly seeing the need to transform from distribution of products to service providers. This book includes considerable insight regarding the importance of the service perspective and how it can be implemented in retailing." --Christian Grönroos, Professor of Service and Relationship Marketing, CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, Hanken School of Economics, Finland "Consisting of chapters written by leading scholars in service management and retailing from around the world, this comprehensive book offers rich insights for how retailers can excel and achieve sustainable competitive advantage by invoking and implementing service management principles. This enlightening book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in retailing." --A. "Parsu" Parasuraman, Professor of Marketing & The James W. McLamore Chair, School of Business Administration, University of Miami Coral Gables, Florida "Service excellence and service innovation are critical for success in today’s competitive retail marketplace. Service Management: The New Paradigm in Retailing provides a contemporary and transformative lens for accomplishing these essential goals." --Mary Jo Bitner, Professor, Director Center for Services Leadership, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University

MANAGING QUALITY SERVICE IN HOSPITALITY: HOW ORGANIZATIONS ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE IN THE GUEST EXPERIENCE, International Edition teaches the concept of treating customers as guests and creating a "WOW" experience for them. Many other texts in this subject area skip over guest-focused service strategy in hospitality or service This text fully covers the topic of managing hospitality organizations by using academic studies and real life experience from companies like Walt Disney Company, Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Darden Restaurants, Southwest Airlines and many others. The text is written in three sections: strategy, staffing, and systems.Each chapter includes at suggested hospitality activities for students, in which students are encouraged to visit local organizations to talk with guests, employees and managers to obtain a variety of perspectives on the guest experience. Other activities will have students going to the internet to visit established sites for hospitality organizations. Real and hypothetical hotels, restaurants, and other business types found in the hospitality industry are included as case studies giving the opportunity for discussion of hospitality concepts and principles. "Ethics in Business" segments encourage students to analyze ethical issues associated with chapter topics. Each chapter opens with learning objectives and discussion questions at the end. The included Instructor's Guide provides answers to the end-of-chapter questions and to the discussion questions following the chapter cases, additional field exercises in hospitality, true-false and multiple-choice quizzes, and additional material to assist the instructor in preparing course outlines and lesson plans, providing the best known about managing hospitality organizations big or small.

This practical, self-study book was developed to help you establish and manage a quality service operation.