What Goes Wrong in Company-Wide Service Quality Initiatives

The meaning of quality is changing. The traditional production based concept of 'conformance to specifications' is at last giving way to the services marketing concept of customer perceived quality. Furthermore, a new view of service quality management is emerging, as a cross-functional issue, which impacts on internal marketing activities across a broad range of a company's endeavours, as well as the total relationship between the firm, its staff and its customers, suppliers and other key markets, on an ongoing basis. Unless management bring these activities together with new forms of collaboration and coordination, there can in our view be no market-orientated quality improvement and therefore no sustainable competitive advantage. This paper describes what goes wrong in company-wide service quality initiatives and why some apparently positive and logical actions turn out to be prescriptions for failure.