Measuring Customer Delight in Tourism and Hospitality Operations: Findings from Singapore and Malaysia

Abstract

The management process for achieving customer delight is crucial for long-term success within the tourism and hospitality industry. In order to achieve customer delight, enterprises require a process for measuring it. This chapter gives an overview of the control circuit of service quality. Drawing on a standard for service excellence developed in Germany, it first outlines theoretical concepts of measuring customer delight for achieving service excellence, and introduces them into the English-language literature on tourism and hospitality. Based on an empirical study, it reports on how measurement is conducted in practice in select businesses in the tourism and hospitality industry in Singapore and Malaysia. Empirical findings show that a business must first determine the standard it aims to attain before designing a measurement. Results from a customer survey need to be reviewed from a business’s perspective. For small-scale businesses, a less sophisticated version of delight measurement may be more appropriate. Examples of how the measurement process itself can be delightful for customers are shown, and recommendations for practice are made.