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The science of service: analyzing the elements of quality assurance.

Article Excerpt
In pursuit of service quality, suppliers have grown from simply ensuring customer happiness to instituting initiatives that affect every business process and operation. Service quality management has become a science, as companies employ quantitative measurement and statistical analysis methods to create and enforce standards of service that meet the expectations of as many customers as possible and resolve the problems of the customers whose expectations are not met.

In all industries, manufacturing or service, travel or otherwise, quality management concepts have progressed rapidly during the past two decades. Entire cottage industries have grown around the implementation of quality standards. Associations have been established for those who create and enforce quality standards, and many of those associations honor corporations, including travel companies, that embody the philosophies of effective quality management.

Many companies have designed their own quality management programs, with the goals, objectives and culture of those companies integrated into the programs. Others have adopted effectively standalone programs and adapted their precepts to fit the corporate cultures.

One of the most well known is the Six Sigma approach, created by Motorola Inc. in 1986 and subsequently adopted by dozens of major corporations, including Carlson Wagonlit Travel and Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Others include the ISO 9000 model, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's leadership criteria and independently developed total quality management models.

Six Sigma, according to Motorola, is an approach that uses heavy statistical analysis to diagnose defects within a corporation's processes, reduce the variability of services offered and strive for as near-zero defects as possible. According to an article published by the company in a May 2002 journal of the American Society for Quality, the key differences between Six Sigma and prior forms of quality management ate the former's focus on executive ownership, establishment of a business strategy execution system, training with a verifiable return on investment, creating a truly cress-functional approach and actual business results, versus the latter's concentration on self-directed work teams, lack of mass training in statistics and quality, single-function basis and orientation to quality itself, rather than business results.

The ISO 9000 structure was created by Geneva, Switzerland-based International Organization of Standardization--a network of national...

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