Service quality and knowledge sharing in the central Kuala Lumpur hotel.

摘要

The growing competition between hoteliers has nowadays caused customers to critically evaluate the quality of services in hotels. But a topic of immediate urgency in this area is the delivery of high quality services which has provided for much challenge. Thus, it is necessary that service providers understand customer trends and find a way that could be helpful towards enhancing the quality of services and achieving customer satisfaction.;In hotels it is difficult to prognosticate the future needs and expectations of customers and this has always been a major challenge. Hence, there is a need to work on ways that help improve the quality of services in hotels and to outline the most important factors in the business in order to provide services that satisfy customers and encourage them to repurchase. On the other hand, in hotels, satisfaction of customers is related to the knowledge that they share with hotel personnel. In fact, hotel employees need to obtain information provided by customers in order to be informed about common failures that hotel guests encounter. Therefore, this research would assess the relationship between knowledge sharing by customers - regarding service quality - customer satisfaction, and the quality of services in a selected hotel in central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For this purpose, two sets of questionnaires were prepared. First 120 customers from eight 3-, 4-, and 5-star hotels in Kuala Lumpur were questioned. The obtained results were compared with the responses of 30 managers of these hotels who were involved in the process of knowledge sharing in hotels. The results indicate that knowledge sharing behavior has a significant and positive relationship with service quality dimensions in the hotel industry but the ranges of value are different for each dimension of service quality. Moreover, the results indicate that knowledge sharing behavior is also related to customer satisfaction in the hotels. In fact, knowledge sharing behavior could have an impact on improving service quality and this can in turn bring about satisfaction of customers in hotels. But managers' responses are in contrast with customers' responses which demonstrate that the amount of knowledge sharing in 5-star hotels is more than 3- and 4-star hotels. This study would help managers and knowledge workers to fully understand the relationship between customer knowledge sharing and service quality and develop an insight into traditional knowledge as opposed to modern knowledge. Moreover, by examining this link, it tries to develop new procedures and strategies to identify weaknesses in service quality, through customer knowledge sharing as an internal power source.