Customer Satisfaction Has Significant Association With Service Quality Dimensions, Essay.

Responsiveness: eagerness to support customers and provide prompt service

Customers are crucial stakeholders in organizations and their satisfaction is a priority to management. Customer satisfaction level is a vital factor for the enhancement of hotel management. Quality of service plays a key role to determine the customer loyalty and level of customer satisfaction (Dunning and McQueen 1981). In this research report, we are interested in Melbourne Marriott Hotel and its customer satisfaction level. The research report shows the eagerness to find the association between quality of service and level of customer satisfaction driven by analysed data collected from the target population of Melbourne Marriott Hotel.

Marriott sets the milestone for hospitality in the worldwide platform. The service quality is of top level and the management authorities as well as employees are found to be friendly, helpful and knowledgeable (Sureshchandar, Rajendran and Anantharaman 2002). The betterment of care is empowered in this hotel.

The research hypothesis interprets the association and link of the factors. The customer loyalty is the reason behind efficient and friendly environment along with service quality dimension.

The major aim and objective purpose of this study is to test the association between customer satisfaction and service quality in service sectors with respect to the service quality dimensions.

Convenient sampling technique was used to gather quantitative data from customers of Melbourne Marriott Hotel. The research model executes the service quality. Chi-square test, descriptive statistics, correlation coefficient are incorporated to test the hypotheses. Hotel management conducted a research to take responses against the questionnaire about how customers make their purchasing decision whether they are pleased with what the organization provides to them in terms of service quality.

The necessary findings that are to be comprehended are “responsiveness”, “empathy”, “reliability”, “assurance” and “tangibility” of the Melbourne Marriott Hotel. The findings imply that service quality is the main factor for customer satisfaction that relies upon responsiveness, tangibility, assurance, empathy and reliability (Cronin, Brady and Hult 2000). To enhance the customer satisfaction level, hotel authority should improve the factors behind satisfaction.

Responsiveness: - It interprets the eagerness to support customers and provide prompt service.

Reliability: - Reliability is the ability to perform the promised service dependably and properly in customer satisfaction.

Tangibility: - In case of customer satisfaction, tangibility indicates physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.

Assurance: - Marriott hotel management have knowledge and courtesy of employees. The authority has ability to inspire trust and confidence.

Empathy: - The caring of individualized attention of the hotel generates its customers.

Reliability: ability to perform promised service dependably and properly

An organization that satisfies its customers consistently enjoys higher retention levels and greater profitability due to increased customer loyalty. To have a relationship with the customers, companies must create association with the customers. As customer-satisfaction is the main issue of every kind of business sectors, the researchers always conducting research about customers that relates the satisfaction level (Sivadas and Baker-Prewitt 2000). Satisfaction varies and changes among individuals. Hence, we need a continuous research in this area. Besides, providing quality services is one of the major targets when it comes to hotel management with respect to customer satisfaction in the business environment. Dynamic relationship among service quality, customer value, customer satisfaction and their influence on future behaviours after the key drives of customer value and customer satisfaction detected.

Is there significant relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality?

Is there significant association between customer satisfaction and dimensions of service quality?

Quality of service are dependent upon following parameters such as speed of service, pricing, complaints and ratings, trust in the hotel service, closeness of relationship, types of service needed and positioning the in clients’ minds. This is more fundamental and beneficial than specificity of transaction of customer satisfaction in predicting customer subsequent behaviour and past, present and future performance of the hotel. The cumulative customer satisfaction encourages the monetary investment of Marriott Hotel for customer satisfaction.

Service quality is a determinant of customer satisfaction because service providers in hotels. Satisfaction and service quality has certain things in common. Satisfaction commonly is a wider concept, whereas service aims specifically on the dimension of service. Though factors such as price and product quality could hamper satisfaction of customer, perceived service quality is a component of customer satisfaction.

As the result of perceptions influenced by relative attitude, the relationship among customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and service dimension is established. Development of structural question models blended the study of customer satisfaction and service quality with customer value and added more weight to the linkage between these two factors (Iacobucci, Ostrom and Grayson, 1995). Customer satisfaction in this study considers service quality as an integral part of conceptual framework.

The report establishes a model in several dimensions that generates an assumption.

H1: Customer satisfaction has significant association with service quality dimensions

H2: Customer satisfaction has a significant association with service quality.

The case study on Melbourne Marriott hotel infers the objectivist stance. Customers of the hotel must be satisfied if the management authority enhances sales for profits, utility for satisfaction and variation for individuals. To advertise and sell out facilities to customers, hotel management authority needs to serve the customers at priority level (Markovic, and Raspor, 2010). The link between customer satisfaction and service quality could have a distinctive outcome in various hotels.

Tangibility: physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of personnel

The main phenomenalism of the case study is established based on deductivism (Johnson?Laird 1991). Commonly, it is known that individuals are irrational beings that perceive situations in different manner and is not possible to get a complete positivist approach in the area of scientific processes.

The deductive approach of case study is dependent upon four types of case study paradigm, that are- subjectivist, Radical change, Regulation and Objectivist (Dominici and Guzzo 2010).

A range of processes of sampling techniques enable researcher to reduce the amount of data required for the case study by considering sub-group rather than possible elements. Stratified samples are collected by non-sampling technique (Sullivan-Bolyai, Bova and Singh, 2014). Sample size determination is an crucial part and often a tough step in planning an empirical case-study. The target population of the case study are the customers as well as people of Melbourne, Australia. The questionnaire is formed to estimate the research questions and 134 responses were undertaken. Both types of data such as qualitative and quantitative data is collected from survey.

The responses were taken in interview method. The responses of the questionnaire are tabulated and analysed by SPSS software. The face-to-face interview method is a well-known sample survey technique to execute the primary research procedure.

The raw data tabulation file has many missing values in many variables. Hence, we filtered the data and reduced it to 103 samples. A descriptive study establishes the association between variables after appropriate data filtration.

The collected data is based on the responses upon closed-ended questions. We summarily accept quantitative data and use “Likert” scale for qualitative (ordinal) data. The questions of the questionnaire of the case study are:

1. What is your age?
2. What is your sex?
3. How is your satisfaction level with Melbourne Marriott Hotel?
4. What is the level of service quality of Marriott Hotel?
5. What is the level of quality of facility of that hotel?
6. How much loyal are you with the service of the Marriott hotel?
7. How is the behavioural status of the employees of the hotel?
8. What is level of managerial service and support towards you in Marriott hotel?
9. How much costly the hotel is?
10. What is the maintenance level of the hotel?
11. How is the availability of billing or transaction of payment in the hotel?

Flowchart of data analysis in deductivism approach (Ban and Ramsaran-Fowdar 2013) 

Most of the hotel customers are very much happy with the quality of service. They rated “Outstanding” quality in a highest preference.

Most of the hotel customers are very much happy with the quality of facilities in the Marriott hotel. They rated “Outstanding” quality in a highest preference.

Most of the customers are preferable to outstanding service quality and customer satisfaction (Sweet and Grace-Martin 1999). The number of customers in this field is significantly large in this sector. Hence we can accept the null hypothesis that there is a significant association between service quality and customer satisfaction.

The 3D bar plot indicates that the three factors (loyalty in service, service quality and quality of facilities) are highly associated with each other. All of them mostly provide outstanding and supreme qualities of factors (DeCoster and Claypool 2004).

Assurance: knowledge and courtesy of employees, ability to inspire trust and confidence

Similar as quality of service, the loyalty in service is mostly rated as “supreme” level in this case.

Most of the customers are agreed with “Excellent” level of support of management and hotel authority.

Significantly a large number of customers agreed to the fact that transaction facility is “Excellent” in Marriott hotel. Therefore, billing and payment of service charges have become very much easier.

The pie-chart indicates that most of the customers are satisfied with the service quality of Marriott hotel.

 The support of management is also satisfactory to the customer as most of them commented “Excellent” and “satisfactory”. 

The customers are quite satisfied with the behavior of employees. 

The customer satisfaction is highly positive according to the pie-chart. 

The clustered box plot interprets that median of quality of facility is excellent or outstanding for each group of price level. 

In case of bad facility, we observe bad customer satisfaction. Otherwise, rest of all kinds of customer satisfaction comes from outstanding quality of facility.

Satisfactory level of support of management brings bad, moderate, good and very good customer satisfaction. However, “Excellent” support of management executes outstanding customer satisfaction. 

The box plot of price level and customer satisfaction interprets that “high” price level creates a great customer satisfaction. 

No defined quality of service level could be associated with support of management and authority. However, excellent support of management upholds outstanding service quality.

The excellent availability of transaction facility creates outstanding level of customer satisfaction.

The stacked bar plot indicates that high level of service loyalty has relevance with high level of customer satisfaction (Taylor and Baker 1994). Therefore, we accept the second hypothesis.

The stacked bar plot indicates that high level of service loyalty has relevance with high level of support of management.

Statistics
		Age	Service Quality	Customer Satisfaction	Facility Quality	Employee Bahaviour	Service Loyalty	Sex	Maintainance Quality	Price Level	Support of Management	Availability of Transaction Facilty
N	Valid	103	103	103	103	103	103	103	103	103	103	103
	Missing	31	31	31	31	31	31	31	31	31	31	31

Customer Satisfaction
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	bad	1	.7	1.0	1.0
	moderate	5	3.7	4.9	5.8
	good	12	9.0	11.7	17.5
	very good	32	23.9	31.1	48.5
	outstanding	53	39.6	51.5	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 53 customers responded “outstanding” grade with a percentage of 51.5%.

Facility Quality
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	very bad	4	3.0	3.9	3.9
	bad	5	3.7	4.9	8.7
	moderate	5	3.7	4.9	13.6
	good	10	7.5	9.7	23.3
	excellent	22	16.4	21.4	44.7
	outstanding	57	42.5	55.3	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 57 customers responded “outstanding” grade with a percentage of 55.3%.

Employee Bahaviour
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	bad	2	1.5	1.9	1.9
	moderate	5	3.7	4.9	6.8
	well	8	6.0	7.8	14.6
	good	17	12.7	16.5	31.1
	very good	25	18.7	24.3	55.3
	excellent	46	34.3	44.7	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 46 customers responded “excellent” grade with a percentage of 44.7%.

Service Loyalty
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	very bad	2	1.5	1.9	1.9
	bad	7	5.2	6.8	8.7
	moderate	6	4.5	5.8	14.6
	good	11	8.2	10.7	25.2
	excellent	12	9.0	11.7	36.9
	outstanding	20	14.9	19.4	56.3
	supreme	45	33.6	43.7	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 45 customers responded “supreme” grade with a percentage of 43.7%.

Sex
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	male	62	46.3	60.2	60.2
	female	41	30.6	39.8	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 62 are male and 41 are female.

Maintainance Quality
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	very poor	2	1.5	1.9	1.9
	poor	4	3.0	3.9	5.8
	moderate	5	3.7	4.9	10.7
	good	11	8.2	10.7	21.4
	very good	22	16.4	21.4	42.7
	excellent	58	43.3	56.3	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 58 customers responded “excellent” grade with a percentage of 56.3%.

Price Level
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	very low	8	6.0	7.8	7.8
	low	11	8.2	10.7	18.4
	moderate	20	14.9	19.4	37.9
	high	16	11.9	15.5	53.4
	very high	27	20.1	26.2	79.6
	very much expensive	20	14.9	19.4	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 20 customers (19.4%) responded “very much expensive” and 27 customers (26.2%) responded that the cost is very high.

Empathy: individualized attention and caring of the hotel for its customers

Support of Management
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	not good	3	2.2	2.9	2.9
	available	11	8.2	10.7	13.6
	good	12	9.0	11.7	25.2
	satisfactiry	27	20.1	26.2	51.5
	Excellent	50	37.3	48.5	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 50 customers responded “outstanding” grade with a percentage of 48.5%.

Availability of Transaction Facilty
		Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
Valid	not good	3	2.2	2.9	2.9
	good	6	4.5	5.8	8.7
	satisfactory	24	17.9	23.3	32.0
	excellent	70	52.2	68.0	100.0
	Total	103	76.9	100.0
Missing	System	31	23.1
Total		134	100.0

Among 103 customers, 70 customers responded “excellent” grade with a percentage of 68%.

Descriptive Statistics
	N	Mean	Std. Deviation	Minimum	Maximum
Service Quality	103	5.6408	1.58333	1.00	7.00
Customer Satisfaction	103	4.2718	.92030	1.00	5.00
Facility Quality	103	5.0583	1.38497	1.00	6.00
Employee Bahaviour	103	5.9029	1.29490	2.00	7.00
Service Loyalty	103	5.5631	1.70737	1.00	7.00
Maintainance Quality	103	5.7379	5.92595	1.00	64.00
Price Level	103	4.0388	1.57133	1.00	7.00
Support of Management	103	4.0680	1.13985	1.00	5.00
Availability of Transaction Facilty	103	3.5631	.73658	1.00	4.00

		Service Quality
		very poor	poor	moderate	good	very good	excellent	outstanding
		Count	Count	Count	Count	Count	Count	Count
Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	2	0	0
	bad	1	0	0	0	1	3	2
	moderate	0	1	0	0	2	1	2
	good	0	0	0	2	2	0	7
	excellent	0	1	0	1	1	5	4
	outstanding	0	2	3	3	3	2	7
	supreme	1	1	1	5	5	11	21

Significantly, outstanding service quality causes supreme level of service loyalty. 

				Service Quality
				very poor	poor	moderate	good	very good	excellent	outstanding
				Count	Count	Count	Count	Count	Count	Count
Customer Satisfaction	bad	Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			moderate	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			good	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			excellent	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			outstanding	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			supreme	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
	moderate	Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			moderate	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			good	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			excellent	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			outstanding	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			supreme	0	0	0	0	1	1	3
	good	Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			moderate	0	0	0	0	1	0	1
			good	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
			excellent	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
			outstanding	0	0	1	0	0	0	0
			supreme	1	0	0	1	0	3	2
	very good	Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	2	0	0
			bad	0	0	0	0	0	2	2
			moderate	0	0	0	0	1	0	0
			good	0	0	0	1	0	0	3
			excellent	0	1	0	0	0	1	0
			outstanding	0	0	2	3	1	1	0
			supreme	0	0	0	1	1	6	4
	outstanding	Service Loyalty	very bad	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
			bad	1	0	0	0	1	1	0
			moderate	0	1	0	0	0	1	1
			good	0	0	0	1	1	0	4
			excellent	0	0	0	1	1	4	3
			outstanding	0	2	0	0	2	1	7
			supreme	0	1	1	3	3	1	11

Significantly, 11 customers who have supreme service loyalty and outstanding service quality, received the outstanding customer satisfaction. 

		Facility Quality
		very bad	bad	moderate	good	excellent	outstanding
		Count	Count	Count	Count	Count	Count
Customer Satisfaction	bad	1	0	0	0	0	0
	moderate	0	1	0	0	1	3
	good	0	1	2	0	1	8
	very good	1	0	1	4	8	18
	outstanding	2	3	2	6	12	28

Here also, significantly, 28 customers who have outstanding quality of facility, has also outstanding level of customer satisfaction.

Chi-Square Test 

Test Statistics
	Service Quality	Customer Satisfaction	Facility Quality	Employee Bahaviour	Service Loyalty	Maintainance Quality	Price Level	Support of Management	Availability of Transaction Facilty
Chi-Square	84.233a	91.320b	124.126c	78.922c	85.864a	169.864a	30.951a	67.049b	111.408d
df	6	4	5	5	6	6	6	4	3
Asymp. Sig.	.000	.000	.000	.000	.000	.000	.000	.000	.000
a. 0 cells (0.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 14.7.
b. 0 cells (0.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 20.6.
c. 0 cells (0.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 17.2.
d. 0 cells (0.0%) have expected frequencies less than 5. The minimum expected cell frequency is 25.8.

The chi-square test of nine predicting factors gives the asymptotic p-value 0.00 (<0.05). Therefore, we reject the hypothesis of having significant normality of the variables (Test 1976).

Conclusion:

The report finds a significant positive association between quality of service and customer satisfaction level. Besides, a significant positive association between factors of service quality and customer satisfaction level is observed. Melbourne Marriott hotel is therefore pretty much popular and successful in the public view. Its service and facility quality are the main reasons behind the customer satisfaction. Melbourne people therefore like the hotel very much.

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