Hospitality Management 17 (1998) 375 390

Quality function deployment: An extended framework for service quality and customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry
Miyoung Jeong *, Haemoon Oh
School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Recreation Management, The Pennsylvania State University, 201 Mateer Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institution Management, The Iowa State University, 6A MacKay Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1120, USA

Abstract Research on service quality and customer satisfaction has become signicant in the hospitality industry. Nonetheless, most previously proposed or introduced research paradigms have focused exclusively on customers without equally emphasizing the intra-organizational service generation and delivery processes. In contrast, this study considers both external and internal service management issues and subsequent service innovations based on the framework of Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD and its relationship to similar concepts are explained. Next, this study provides an overview of the QFD process and develops a hypothetical application in the lodging industry in order to illustrate future application and analysis strategies. Some benets and disadvantages of the QFD process are discussed as compared to extant service quality and customer satisfaction paradigms. Finally, suggestions and directions are oered for future applications, with particular interest in hospitality-specic service management issues. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Quality function deployment or QFD; Customer satisfaction; Service process; Service innovations; Service design; Service quality

1. Introduction The hospitality industry has witnessed increasing competition for high service quality and customer satisfaction. This is because customer retention through service quality and satisfaction has become vital in such saturated markets as the lodging industry. Today, the majority of hospitality rms are implementing one or two

*Corresponding author. Tel.: 001 814 234 9799; fax: 001 814 863 4257; e-mail: mxj116@psu.edu. 02784319/98/$ See front matter PII: S 02 7 8 4 31 9 ( 98 ) 0 00 2 4 3 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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corporate-wide quality management programs designed to improve service oerings and market retention. For example, RitzCarltons TQM program has been widely recognized as a quality winner (Partlow, 1993), while Sheraton recently initiated the Guest Satisfaction System to enhance customers lodging experience and boost return rates. It is also notable that, as a central part of these industry wide eorts, a number of research paradigms such as SERVQUAL, the expectancydisconrmation model, and LODGQUAL have been introduced into the hospitality industry (for a detailed review, see Oh and Parks, 1996). When todays market conditions as well as increasingly diversifying customer preferences are considered, the importance of service quality and customer satisfaction is expected to grow further. Despite these increased customer-oriented marketing eorts in the hospitality industry, relatively little attention has been given to the process of service design. Although most research programs have focused on measuring customer perceptions of service quality and satisfaction, few have provided company-specic guidelines for how to design services to meet the quality standards expected by customers. That is, the extant service quality and satisfaction programs were developed primarily as a tool to diagnose a companys service performance and to understand consumer purchase behavior, but they have not considered actively the intra-organizational service development processes that can support the marketing initiatives of hospitality rms. Service design or development processes should be emphasized in every service quality and satisfaction program in the hospitality industry. Although the ongoing quality improvement programs can provide hospitality managers with useful information about the companys performance and its customers, improvement in service quality and customer satisfaction cannot occur unless the obtained information is successfully incorporated into subsequent service deliveries. Berry, et al. (1994) observed that 2Design aws in any part of a service system can reduce quality. It is tempting to blame poor quality on the people delivering service but frequently the real culprit is poor service system design (p.37). This is particularly true when service design is viewed not only as a new product development process but also as innovations in existing products and services. In this context, the industrys endeavor for high quality and customer satisfaction must be targeted towards a continuous chain of activities including delivering products/services, understanding customers, redesigning or innovating products/services, and redelivering improved products/services. The purpose of this paper is to propose for the hospitality industry a systematic, structured approach, called Quality Function Deployment (QFD), to designing new or renovating extant services with a focus on both external customer needs and internal service management requirements. Therefore, the QFD framework proposed in this paper is to be viewed as a comprehensive model integrating market demands into internal research and development (R and D) activities. The concept of QFD and its relationship to related concepts are explained rst, followed by an overview of the QFD model and the general model building process. Then, an illustrative QFD model applied to the lodging industry is developed to facilitate future applications and understanding of the process. The strengths and weaknesses of general QFD models are discussed with suggestions for future hospitality research in this direction.

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2. The concept of QFD Quality Function Deployment was introduced in 1972 at the Kobe shipyard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (Ansari and Modarress, 1994). The concept further evolved through an application by the Toyota Motor Company and its suppliers as well as through extensive research by the Quality Function Deployment Research Committee of the Japan Society for Quality Control (King, 1987). Major automobile companies such as General Motors and Ford Motor Co. and manufacturing companies such as 3M, HewlettPackard, and Texas Instruments introduced QFD to American industry in the early 1980s. Grin and Houser (1993) estimated that more than 100 US rms applied the QFD model in 1991. The results of QFD applications have been remarkable with, for example, 60% reductions in design costs and 40% reductions in design time in early applications (Houser and Clausing, 1988). Although the concept of QFD was originally developed and widely adopted by manufacturing companies for product development purposes, QFD researchers have argued that the framework can be applied in non-manufacturing environments such as airlines, hotels, and utilities (Ansari and Modarress, 1994). It is not easy to dene QFD due to its comprehensive and detailed nature. Bicknell and Bicknell (1995) simply dene QFD as a systematic approach mapping the customers needs into denable and measurable product and process parameters, using matrices and other quantitative and qualitative techniques (p. 28). As implied in the denition, QFD translates market demands (i.e., customer needs) into functions implementable in management decision processes. Furthermore, QFD bases its general model building process on both qualitative and quantitative customer research and close cooperation among the functional units of the organization. In essence, QFD takes into account not only the customers but also the organizational process. Distinction should be made among related concepts. QFD can be viewed as one of the key techniques in the TQM process (Dean and Bowen, 1994). While TQM focuses on the continuous improvement of inputoutput eectiveness across the entire scope of the organization, QFD can be viewed as an application of the TQM philosophy to new product development (Lockamy and Khurana, 1995). QFD also diers from recently introduced service quality and customer satisfaction research paradigms such as SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry, 1988) in that it provides structured guidelines for re-designing services as well as developing new products, rather than simply describing or measuring service quality and customer satisfaction.

3. Overview of the QFD model 3.1. The house of quality The overall process of QFD is based on its core matrix framework, called the house of quality, which is used to intertwine customer needs, service design/management requirements, target design goals, and competitive product/service evaluations. Fig. 1 displays the house of quality and its components. Although this paper presents only

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a basic skeleton of the house of quality, the framework is always expandable both vertically and horizontally depending upon the characteristics of the organization and its market. 3.2. Components of the house As can be seen in Fig. 1, the house of quality consists of several components and each component needs to be built into the house in an orderly manner. Fig. 1 illustrates the procedure of building the house of quality by the numerical order. For instance, customer needs must be rst identied and placed on the left side of the house (Step 1). Next, these customer needs are quantied and ranked in order of importance (Step 2). Step 2 also includes conducting comparative analyses of key competitors based on the customer needs identied in Step 1. In the third step, management needs to specify service design and management requirements across all relevant functional units of the organization from an organizational perspective.

Fig. 1. The house of quality the framework.

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Management then has to determine intuitively the degree of contribution made by each of the service design/management requirements in meeting specied customer needs (Step 4). The fth step determines the relative weight of each service design/management requirement based upon customer needs. Finally, the construction of the house of quality is completed by examining the pairwise correlations between the service design/management requirements themselves and by placing the correlations in the roof area (Step 6). Further descriptions of each component as well as the working methods of building a house of quality are given below.

4. Applications of the QFD model Only a few QFD attempts are found in the service arena. For example, Florida Power and Light implemented QFD and, as a result, shortened customer waiting time, thereby improving customer satisfaction (Graessel and Zeidler, 1993). QFD was also applied to a distance education program and the results were improvement in service quality, reduced curriculum design times, and increased student satisfaction (Murgatroyd, 1993). Berkley (1996) recently attempted to explore the QFD framework with a nightclub service example. Unfortunately, however, few studies have demonstrated the applicability of QFD in the hospitality, and especially lodging, industry. 4.1. An illustration Building on the recent applications of QFD in the service environment, this study has developed a hypothetical example in an eort to illustrate how the QFD model can be applied to lodging and possibly to other hospitality services. To enhance the practical applicability of the QFD process in the lodging and other hospitality industries, this section is devoted to explicating step-by-step procedures in constructing a house of quality. Useful conceptual discussions on diculties in applying QFD to intangible services are found elsewhere (Berkley, 1996). Fig. 2 presents the hypothetical house of quality with its detailed contents. The house was built utilizing a spreadsheet program (i.e., MS Excel). The process of developing this example is explained below in detail. Step 1. Identifying customer needs: Customer needs are identied typically through survey research, focus group discussion, or personal interview. The key question to be asked here is what the customers need (or want or expect) from the company. Customer needs can be expressed on detailed service attributes; these attributes can be grouped either by their characteristics or by utilizing factor analysis techniques. This studys example tentatively adopted and modied some service attributes and their relative dimensions from Parasuraman et al.s (1994) research. For example, customer needs can be expressed along the reliability dimension, which can be measured with multiple attributes including services done right the rst time, correct billing, and problem handling. Similarly, customer needs can be measured on the

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Fig. 2. The house of quality an illustration.

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promptness of services and employees willingness to help, both of which comprise a responsiveness dimension. To measure the quality of tangibles, three items were adopted: modern equipment, visual appearance of the facilities, and professional appearance of the sta. Step 2. Prioritizing customer needs and conducting competitive benchmarking: Several tasks are involved in this step. The customer value column in Fig. 2 contains the customers importance rating of each need attribute that can be obtained directly from market research. The importance of the need attributes can be measured on a 7-point 1"not at all important to 7"very important scale. For example, the customers may rate correct billing as very important (7). Columns service performance, competitor A, and competitor B indicate the customers, or alternatively the managements, perceptions of the current performance by the company and its competitors in each of the customer need attributes, respectively. The current performance can be replaced with the ability to perform in the case of new service development or design. In this way, the company is directly compared to its competitors. Both current performance and ability to perform can be measured again on a 7-point 1"poor to 7"excellent scale. In the present example, the promptness of service was rated as 4 for the company, 5 for competitor A, and 4 for competitor B. The management also sets the performance goal for each need attribute and determines the sales point based on its experience. Consistently, the scale used to express the performance goal of each attribute is a 7-point 1"poor to 7"excellent rating scale. Management should be realistic in setting a performance goal, based on the availability or ability of the companys resources. Sales points are the evaluation of features that would directly inuence a sale and they are graded eectively on a rating scale with three anchoring points: 1.5 indicates a feature that is a signicant sales point (i.e., the company has a big advantage when it meets customer needs on that attribute); 1.2 is a moderately powerful sales point (i.e., a slight competitive advantage); and 1 is assigned to features that have no sales-point impact (i.e., no competitive advantage at all) (Bicknell and Bicknell, 1995; Cohen, 1988). While dierent sets of scale with dierent numeric anchoring values may be considered for sales point evaluations, research to date shows that this 3-point rating scale (i.e., with numeric anchoring values of 1.5, 1.2, and 1) is most eective (King, 1987). The improvement ratio is computed by dividing the performance goal by the current service performance. For example, the improvement ratio of 1.5 for the problem handling attribute was obtained by dividing its performance goal of 6 by its current service performance of 4. This ratio gives a weighted value for the customer needs that would require improvement (Bicknell and Bicknell, 1995). The raw importance weight of customer needs is the product of the three elements, i.e., customer value, the improvement ratio, and the sales point. For example, the raw weight of 13.5 for prompt service is the product of its customer value of 6, its improvement ratio of 1.5, and its sales point of 1.5. These weights provide the rank order of the customer needs according to the combined assessment of the importance of meeting the need, the amount of improvement the company wishes to achieve, and

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the extent to which the need could be used to directly inuence sales of the service (Cohen, 1988). The relative weights are normalized values of the raw weights; they are computed by dividing the raw weight of each individual need attribute by the column sum. For example, the relative weight of 6% for modern equipment is obtained by dividing its raw weight of 4.8 by the column sum of 74, times 100. The relative weight is often used for prioritizing service design/management requirements to meet customer needs eectively. Finally, relative weights and competitive benchmarking are graphically represented to visualize the importance of customer needs and the current performance of the company as compared to that of its competitors. Step 3. Developing service design/management requirements: Service design/management requirements are specied on the basis of the companys operational or managerial resource allocation plans in order to satisfy the customers. The key question to ask in this step is how the company delivers services. These requirements can be easily grouped by such functional service units as the front desk, housekeeping, and food and beverage department. In Fig. 2, for example, the arrangement is based on management control or service delivery system. That is, hotel management may want to focus on sta courtesy, fast check-in, and professional handling of guest complaints in its front oce operations. Similarly, cleanliness, timely arrangement of sales, and room items in working order may be key managerial control points in housekeeping operations. Management can also develop and arrange the requirements in a way to meet the customer needs, depending upon the organizational characteristics. Additional functional units and requirements can be added as needed. Step 4. Constructing the relationship matrix between customer needs and service design/management requirements: Each of the service design/management requirements is correlated individually to each of the customer need attributes by considering to what extent a requirement contributes to meeting customer needs for the attribute. This step requires extensive cooperation and strong consensus among managers of functional units, based on their expertise in and experiences with service processes. Depending upon the impact of the requirement on meeting customer needs for the attribute, management assigns a 0"no relationship, 1"possible relationship, 3"moderate relationship, and 10"strong relationship (Cohen, 1988). For example, courtesy of the front desk sta was thought to strongly inuence the customers need for employees high willingness to help the customers; consequently, a ten point was assigned to the cell of these two attributes. In a similar way, a zero point was assigned to the cell for cleanliness in housekeeping services by the customers need for correct billing, indicating no relationship between the two. Ideally, managers of all functional units participate in determining the strength of the relationship. Although a complete consensus among managers is desired for each cell, discrepancies can be resolved through reconciliation. Teamwork or individual interview techniques can be used for this purpose. The process of constructing the relationship matrix promotes strong cooperation among managers and, consequently, close cooperation among the functional units of the organization.

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Step 5. Prioritizing service design/management requirements: The raw importance and relative weight of each service design/management requirement are computed using the relationship matrix and the relative importance of each customer need attribute. The accuracy of the results in this step relies heavily on the quality of the relationship matrix. The raw importance weight of each service design/management requirement is calculated by summing across the products of the relationship strength (i.e., the cell value assigned in the relationship matrix) and the relative weight of the customer need attribute (i.e., the value in the last column). For example, the raw importance weight of sanitation requirement in food and beverage services can be computed as follows
Service attribute First service Correct billing . . . Professional appearance Sum Sanitation requirement 1 0 . . . 10 Relative weight ; ; . . . ; 15 20 . . . 6 "15 "0

"60 "268

This computation process intertwines customer needs with service design/management requirements. That is, the resulting value determines the relative weight of each of the requirements as compared to customer needs. As in the case of the relative weights of customer needs, the relative weights of service design/management requirements are calculated by dividing the individual raw importance weight of each requirement by its row sum (i.e., normalization). For example, the relative weight of 13% for the fast check-in requirement at the front desk is obtained by dividing its raw weight of 559 by its row sum of 4385. The relative weights determine the key service design/management requirements that can help satisfy customer needs. Also implied in the relative weights are the deployment strategies of service functions or requirements. Finally, the relative weights are presented in graph to provide quick insight into key requirements. Step 6. Determining interactions between pairs of service design/management requirements: The nal step of the QFD model building is that management determines the degree of the functional relationship for each pair of service design/management requirements. The derivation of the relationship may also be based on the degree of necessary collateral eorts between the two functional units involved. In the present example, four dierent degrees of relationship (i.e., none, possible, moderate, and strong) were considered for each pair of the requirements, using dierent symbols. For example, the friendliness requirement of the food and beverage sta was thought to have a moderate relationship with the fast check-in and complaint handling requirements at the front desk. Thus their relationships were marked with a box (see Fig. 2). The house also shows that the food quality requirement does not have any operational relationship with the three requirements in housekeeping services.

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The relationship marks in the roof area of the house have two usages. If they are identied early in the QFD process, they may indicate the required level of cooperation among functional unit managers in constructing the house of quality. When the relationship roof is used after the completion of the QFD process, it points to the degree of cooperation among the managers in service delivery to eectively meet customer needs. 4.2. Analysis of the house of quality and action measures The house of quality illustrated above has a number of implications if applied to a real situation. A few of them are discussed here as examples, while great many detailed analyses are reserved for future studies. First, the house of quality provides management with a concrete importance structure of customer needs as well as the service design/management requirements. The graphic representations of the importance structure are likely to be helpful to service designers and managers in conguring service strategies tailored to customer needs. For example, the illustrative house of quality shows that the customers needs are higher in both reliability and responsiveness service attributes than in tangible attributes. In this case, as Berry et al. (1994) exhorted, hotel companies must train employees for providing promised performances on such intangible attributes as the friendliness of the food and beverage sta, fast check-in, and the courtesy of the front desk sta. This training need in such intangible areas is clearly shown, as a result of the QFD process, by the graphic representation of the service design/management requirements at the bottom of the house. In this way, the QFD process translates customers high needs in both reliability and responsiveness attributes into internal service design requirements. Depending upon the results of an actual QFD process, management may change its deployment strategies of resources. Second, the companys current service performance or capability to perform to meet customer needs is vividly compared to that of its key competitors. This competition analysis shows that the hypothetical hotel is not performing as well as its two competitors in meeting overall customer needs. The graphic presentation on the rightmost side of the house visualizes this point. In particular, the hotel is shown to underperform its two competitors in handling problems and helping customers. Therefore, for the hotel to compete successfully in the marketplace, the hotel management again should emphasize educating employees on how to handle guest complaints and problems as well as building proper service attitudes among employees. Despite the high strategic value of competition analysis like this, most extant service quality and customer satisfaction programs have not addressed this aspect systematically. Another analysis can be illustrated by focusing on the roof area. Although cooperation among functional service units has not been emphasized suciently in many service quality and customer satisfaction eorts, the hypothetical house of quality shows that there is a need for cooperation among them, at least at a functional level, in delivering services. Teamwork was one of the ten most important lessons learned from previous service quality studies, as Berry et al. (1994) said service-performance

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shortfalls are highly correlated with the absence of teamwork (p. 41). Organizing cross-functional teams in which service providers from dierent parts of the service chain are grouped to serve a common set of customers may be eective in this case. To this end, the QFD framework provides an excellent opportunity for such an organizational eort to maneuver strong cross-functional collaboration. Positive implications and interpretations of the QFD model could go on. 4.3. Reliability and validity The reliability of a QFD model depends critically on the internal consistencies of the derived relative importance between customer needs and service design/management requirements. In essence, similar items between customer needs and management requirements should demonstrate a corresponding signicance (or carry an equivalent weight) in the house of quality. This will enable management to rely rmly on the QFD-driven discriminant weights for the design requirements as a means to meet customer needs eectively. Evidence of the internal consistency exists in the example. The relative weight column indicates that customer needs for correct billing, prompt service, service right the rst time, professional problem handling, and employees willingness to help customers were relatively important, all exceeding 14% in their importance. The QFD model successfully translated this importance structure of customer needs into the relative importance such similar management requirements as friendliness of the food and beverage personnel, fast check-in, front-desk sta courtesy, timely room arrangement, and keeping room items in working order. This was well reected in the relative weight row of the house. Thus, it can be said that the QFD model successfully translated what customers want into how management should design and deliver services. A similar pattern is also found by comparing relatively unimportant customer needs for the tangible items to the resulting unimportant management requirement items such as food quality and sanitation which could be rather visual in customer perceptions. Therefore, it would seem that, once constructed with care, the QFD model will be reliable. Also, QFD applications involving actual customer needs and internal design requirements are believed to establish much clearer reliabilities of the model because they will tend to reect the market and organizational conditions vividly. The validity of the QFD model may be aected by the specications and interpretations of customer needs and service design/management requirements. That is, dierent specications (e.g., dierent numbers or levels) of customer needs may produce dierent structures of the relative importance of design/management requirements. This specication problem was one of the points emphasized by Berkley (1996) in function analysis. Thus, management must be careful in generating the items of customer needs and management requirements. Equally important are precise interpretations of the need and requirement items. Inaccurate interpretations can undermine the central correlation matrix in the house of quality and, consequently, lead to wrongful outcomes. Although this study cannot provide the results of validity assessments due to the hypothetical nature of the illustrative

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example, future QFD researchers and practitioners must consider validity issues rigorously.

5. Strengths and weaknesses of QFD 5.1. Strengths The QFD process, when adopted carefully, oers numerous direct and indirect benets to hospitality operators; some of the salient benets are discussed here. First, it systematically interfaces external customer needs with a rms service generation eorts. This point is particularly important in that many other service quality and customer satisfaction programs concentrate mainly on the external market demand. In this context, the QFD process can be an excellent tool to close simultaneously all the ve service gaps proposed in service quality model by Parasuraman et al.s (1985) and Zeithaml et al. (1988) (i.e., the Gaps Model). For example, service gaps occur when management misperceives customer needs (Gap 1), when services are misspecied (Gap 2), when services are misdelivered (Gap 3), when services are miscommunicated (Gap 4), and when service performances do not meet customer expectations (Gap 5). Customer-dened importance of need attributes in the beginning QFD process minimizes Gap 1. Active participation and strong cooperation required of functional managers in constructing the relationship matrix contributes to the elimination of Gaps 2 4. Then, the closing of Gap 5 is one of the ultimate goals of the whole QFD process in the long run. Second, the QFD model oers a realistic opportunity to advance the previously proposed models to remedy service problems. As a result of more than a decade-long research program, Berry et al. (1994) found that delivering quality service was in part a design challenge. They proposed service mapping as one of the ways to improve service system design. Similarly, Shostack (1984) earlier introduced service blueprints as a way to diagnose service delivery problems. Nevertheless, these proposals did not include a specic instrumental method for doing so. When added to service mapping and blueprinting techniques, the QFD process is expected to provide management with more actions-oriented guidelines for service design as well as a more holistic view of the service delivery and design process. Third, QFD also provides a structured method for proactively designing quality into a process (Murgatroyd, 1993). Few research paradigms have suggested specic guidelines for translating market demand into a service companys production process. This is particularly critical to service organizations with limited resources. Therefore, an accurate translation of customer needs into company-specic quality or service function deployment strategies is the rst step for a company seeking to maximize the output of limited resources. QFD assists management in improving the process of service design with limited resources. Fourth, the QFD process promotes not only eective communication but also close cooperation among functional managers and business units. Strong teamwork was emphasized by Berry et al. (1994) for service excellence. Because group consensus on

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the assignments of numerical values throughout the house of quality is essential, QFD participants are required to communicate extensively about both customer needs and management requirements. This process is likely to help in enhancing cross-functional relationships within a service organization, which is essential for maintaining a healthy organization. Another unique feature of QFD is its capability to deal with several key competitors simultaneously. The example in this study included a starting point for considering competitors in the QFD framework. Assessments of key competitors with regard to the capabilities of the company as well as the market demand may provide the company with invaluable strategic visions. The QFD process also aords a great deal of exibility in its application. Although the QFD process may look complicated, companies need not attempt to construct a house of quality for the entire organization from the beginning. QFD can be applied to one or two focal functional areas rst and companies may expand the house by including other functional areas later. In the same way, a few strategic customer needs may be a good starting point for building a house of quality, and then additional needs can be incorporated periodically. In this way, management reserves full control over the QFD process based on the companys strategic intent. 5.2. Weaknesses Despite the strong potential of QFD for the hospitality industry, several potential limitations must be considered with future applications. In the rst place, QFD relies heavily on data obtained from the customers through market research and from functional managers through formal and informal discussions. Thus, inaccurate input data due to such reasons as response bias and wrongful research methods may provide unreliable guidelines for service management. Secondly, the entire QFD process may be a cumbersome procedure, demanding excessive involvement from various functional units. Once established, however, QFD becomes a baseline process; subsequent revisions and updates can be done easily thereafter. In particular, when the house of quality is prepared with spreadsheet programs, as was done in this study, revisions and expansions are an easy task. Finally, another limitation might be that the chart may quickly become too large to handle. This problem may be resolved by reducing the number of service attributes and service design/management requirements to a smaller set of key items.

6. Suggestions and directions for future QFD applications The hypothetical application example presented in this paper provides a general guideline for applying the QFD process in the hospitality industry. Although the presented example already covered quite extensive details, some additional hospitality-specic issues are considered in this section in order to facilitate continuing this line of research in the hospitality and tourism industry.

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(a) Determine a set of key service attributes. Selected service attributes are used to assess the customers generic needs and wants. The selected attributes then should be applicable to the selected competitors. Although a number of hospitality researchers have provided almost exhaustive sets of service attributes (e.g., Callan, 1994), simply adopting their results does not seem promising since an excessive number of service attributes may cause an ineective QFD process. In addition, the selected list of attributes must be company-specic as well as competition-oriented. (b) Specify critical service design/management requirements. Along with the set of service attributes, careful consideration must be given to identifying the service design/management requirements. Although the hypothetical example arranged the requirements by the functional unit for the sake of convenience, it is not a required method. Alternatively, the requirements may be arranged based on available resources or the companys core competencies or capabilities. A cross-functional specication of service requirements may be another way. In the same context, QFD researchers must consider the range of cooperation or involvement among service performance units of the organization when specifying the requirements. (c) Establish reliable data collection methods. To increase the outcome of the QFD process, reliable and valid data generation methods must be developed in advance. For example, Grin and Houser (1993) discussed focus group and personal interview methods as a means of deriving customers reliable importance ratings on service attributes. A good method of increasing cooperation among QFD participants should be developed. Though ideal, it is not realistic to have all necessary functional managers at the same place during the entire process of constructing a house of quality. Thus, alternative methods such as internal surveys or comment cards should be developed to minimize operational interruptions while maximizing managerial cooperation. (d) ake a step-by-step approach. Most hospitality services are multi-functional, and designing them is thus a challenging process. As discussed earlier, companies need not attempt to construct a comprehensive QFD chart at one time. It may be too demanding to cover a fully-loaded large hotel property in a single QFD framework. The QFD process may well start with a focus on one or two key areas, such as the front desk and guest rooms, and build up part by part thereafter. Restaurant operators may apply QFD only to a new menu development process and expand it to the operations of the entire dining room and kitchen later. The QFD process can still be applied to developing the optimal marketing mix of a company and its competitors vying for a common target market. (e) Be exible and creative. The house of quality is subject to further expansion, depending on managerial needs. For instance, the hypothetical house of quality can be extended to have additional rows and columns. One possibility is that an additional row species the target level or value of each service design/management requirement. Similarly, more graphic presentations can be incorporated into the house of quality. ( f ) Review and revise. Finally, the process as well as the outcome of QFD needs to be carefully examined by managers to assure reliability and validity. Because of its heavy dependence on the data obtained from both the customers and managers, the outcome of QFD may not be valid with unreliable input data. A sensible choice of the

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need and requirement items and accurate interpretations of the results are crucial to maximizing the oerings of the QFD model. If the results of the QFD process do not represent the reality well, a careful review and reconstruction of the house of quality may be necessary.

7. Summary and concluding remarks This study attempted to introduce QFD techniques as an extension of TQM and other service quality and customer satisfaction research paradigms. The value of QFD as compared to that of the extant research paradigms in the hospitality industry was discussed. When applied, QFD shows a great deal of potential for improving the quality of hospitality services and the level of customer satisfaction, thereby increasing customer retention and market share. The concept of QFD and its relationship with other similar concepts were explicated. QFD can be viewed simultaneously as an extension of and complement to the hospitality industrys endeavor towards service quality and customer satisfaction. The overall QFD framework was reviewed based on the house of quality, and a hypothetical application with lodging services was presented. This study further discussed the strengths and weaknesses of QFD. The QFD process oers a number of strengths over the conventional service quality and customer satisfaction programs. Finally, suggestions and directions for future applications of QFD in the hospitality industry were developed with particular concerns given to hospitality-specic issues. Although this study was not able to provide real application examples from the hospitality industry due to undocumented cases in the literature, the hypothetical example developed by the study is believed to have provided a good starting point to consider QFD as the next step towards service excellence. It would be desirable in the hospitality industry that a systematic, structured framework becomes available to assist management in developing successful strategies for the deployment of service functions as well as service innovations.

References
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About the Authors Miyoung Jeong is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Recreation Management at the Pennsylvania State University. Her major area of interest is the applications and impact of information technology in the hospitality industry. Haemoon Oh is an assistant professor in the Department of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institution Management at the Iowa State University. He earned his doctoral degree in hospitality marketing from the school of Hotel, Restaurant, and Recreation Management at the Pennsylvania State University. His major areas of research are service quality and consumer satisfaction.