Total Quality Management in Services

Total Quality Management is a component of strategic managment, which improves an organization from top to bottom. In particular, it is a structured approach, which aims at enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty through a continous improvement of services quality.

Total Quality Management in services is extremely sensitive to ineffective strategy implementation. Services are delivered to consumers as soon as they are produced by the provider and this inseparability of production and consumption requires extremely effective processes in TQM implementation.

[...] Companies that have implemented EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) Excellence Model have based their Total Quality Management on customer focus, result orientation, continuous learning, innovation & improvement and corporate social responsibility. Thus, they have met their corporate goals by implementing quality-driven strategies effectively Challenges of TQM in Services Despite the benefits for any service provider that implements TQM effectively, Services sector faces two major challenges related to the quality delivered to customers. These are: Information Technology Information Technology is related to how well the service does what the customer thinks it is supposed to do. [...]

[...] Yet, in Services perceived quality refers to the benefits the customer will derive from the consumption of the service relative to the expectations attached to this service, while in Manufacturing perceived quality refers to the total benefits derived from the use of the product over the total cost of the product Benefits of TQM in Services The most important benefits of TQM for a service organization are described below. Intrinsic motivation of employees Research has shown that the more a task is linked to an expected reward the more the performance deteriorates as a result of a routine process used only to ensure compensation and not outperforming the task. [...]

[...] As a result of not bearing the ability to be stored, services require greater expenditure on labor than in capital and they need to be executed correctly. In that sense, the most important component is the human capital that performs the service. Lack of ownership Unlike manufacturing products, services are not owned. They are temporarily accessed or used by the owner TQM Principles for the Services sector TQM is concerned with the processes used in an organization. The applied processes should evoke a proactive corporate attitude, knowledge of customer base, clear corporate goals based on customer requirements, innovative strategic thinking, balanced approaches which reduce the variations and definitely management involvement. [...]