Bridge the gaps: from deficiency to superior service.

In the face of ever intense competition and limited resources, it is management's primary concern to seek out accurate and effective ways for uncovering deficient service quality attributes and the real causes behind them. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to develop a two-phased service quality strategy model to identify defective service attributes and uncover their root causes by integrating the importance-performance gap analysis model, service triangle and gap analysis. A survey conducted on the guests, front-line servers and managers from nine different restaurant outlets of three similar international hotels in Taiwan is presented to empirically substantiate the suitability and practicality of this proposed model. The findings demonstrated that the model was fitted for the hotel in question to identify its defective service quality attributes, prioritize their order of improvement and consequently reveal the causes behind by analyzing the existence of the gaps among customers, managers and front-line servers. The managerial implication for restaurant managers is to reallocate resources and efforts in service areas that require immediate improvement. With this particular model, management now can serve their customers well even with limited resources.