Service Blueprinting Report of Golden Olives Italian Restaurant

Introduction

Currently, the businesses are greatly influenced by the global forces and the prevailing trends which tend to define if the company is going to succeed or not. In a way, these external forces influence how these organizations will interact with their customers and respond to competition. Due to the continuous competition that businesses face on a daily basis, there is a constant search for new ways of improving the service delivering in every business setup. Service quality and customer satisfaction have become one of the most imperative core marketing goals for business since these are the prerequisite of building customer loyalty, like repeat sales and spread of positive word-of-mouth by the customers (A. Maroco & J. Maroco, 2013; Ryu, Lee, & Kim 2012). The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the services in Golden Olives Restaurant and from the examination, experience creates a detailed service blueprint for this business establishment.

Service Blueprinting Report of Golden Olives Italian Restaurant

Location: 3801 Warner Ave, Huntington Beach, CA 92649

Date: Tuesday, November 14, 2017-Thursday, November 16, 2016.

Time: 12.45 PM.

The services will be based on the following blueprints:

Figure 1: Blueprint template.

Figure 2: Services.

Figure 3: Satisfaction criteria.

Figure 3: What needs rectification.

Figure 4: Additional services for increased customer satisfaction.

Core Customer Benefits

Every business which is customer-oriented needs to understand the wants, needs, and the expectations before they even start to offer the services. This ensures that the establishment meets the demands of the customers. Kandampully (2007) asserts that every business must first examine what comprises is core services are before they start offering services which benefit its customers. In Welcome to the Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore (1998) mention the five essential experience design elements which will provide a guide for a business to optimize the customer experience as well as providing the vital benefits which the consumer seeks. According to Pine and Gilmore (1998), these five essential elements include theme experience, harmonize impressions, elimination of negative cues, mix in memorabilia, and engaging all the five senses. Through these key features, the benefits and experience of a consumer can be manipulated through several techniques that will assist in assigning a high value to the experience and as a result help in meeting the core benefits of the customer.

A business may offer products and services as the core benefits that its customers benefit from the company. However, there are other benefits which the business can create for its customers. Nasution and Mavondo (2008) intone that the delivery of value for customers has become the core theme of firms in the current market. Value is in form of the benefits which the customer get from interacting with the business. There are several benefits which a customer seek to derive when staying in a luxury hotel. These benefits include, satisfaction, customer experience, achievement of desired outcomes, relationship benefits, and feeling confident following the use of service or product.

Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the marketing element which indicates how the products or the services offered to a consumer meet or exceed their customer expectation (A. Maroco & J. Maroco, 2013). This is a very crucial element in business as it provides marketers and business owners the metric of determining what method they can use to improve their activities. In the hotel industry, customer satisfaction is often ignored despite this element being used in to indicate significant differences in the meaning and ranking of the hotel efficiency scores (Assaf & Magnini 2012; A. Maroco & J. Maroco, 2013). Customer satisfaction in the hotel industry starts from the first point of contact, for instance, between the hotel guest and the attendants of the hotel. It is vital for a hotel establishment to use the first impression to create a lasting impression on the customer about the quality of products and services offered by the business. If the hotel establishment continuously meet or surpass the expectations of its customers, then clients would be said to be satisfied with the quality of products and services offered by the business. Raza et al. (2012) established that in the hotel industry, customer satisfaction, quality of the service and the perceived value showed a highly significant relationship between these variables. As such, customer satisfaction can be obtained by excelling in those three factors.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is the result of the interaction between an organization and a customer over a period. This interaction can be split into three parts including customer journey, the touchpoints of the brand, and the interaction with the environment including the digital environment which the customer experiences during the stay at the hotel. Nasution and Mavondo (2008) assert that there is usually a misconception of what the managers believe that their businesses offer to what the customer really experience. As such, it is imperative for the hotel experience to improve the customer experience as a way of benefiting the customers.

Prestige

Wiedmann, Hennigs, and Siebels (2009) mention that the consumers desire to impress oneself and others drive the need to buy luxurious commodities. There is the social orientation to consumer products or services which are extravagant as that elevates the prestigious state of an individual. The same motivation drives the need to feel the prestigious aspect of the services or products offered by a hotel. Customers derive a prestigious feeling as it elevates their ego as well as improve their social standing among friends and family. As such, a hotel establishment should position its services to provide the luxurious feeling to its consumers.

Value for money

Value for money refers to the well worth of spending money on a product or a service. An empirical study by Amin et al. (2013), indicates that consumers are increasingly becoming conscious of the quality of the services they receive from the hotel industry. Basing on these findings, it is imperative for a hotel establishment to improve the quality of services and products offered as this could contribute to customer loyalty to the business.

Figure 5. Some of the food offered at the restaurant.

Relationship benefits

Business-customer relationship plays a vital part in the business partnership and loyalty between a customer and a business entity. Customers perceive the establishment of a bond between the business entity and them as a way of deriving fulfillment. Dagger and David (2012) found that the existence of a relationship between customer satisfaction and the relationship between the firm and its customers. As such, as the relationship grows, the customers perceived benefits would also improve.

Moments Of Truth, Possible Reasons for Occurrence and Solutions.Moment of Truth # 1- Arrival and ReceptionMy first moment of truth came when I first visited the restaurant as the cab pulled up to the 3801 Warner Avenue entrance. From what I had seen on their website, I expected a whole different experience from the one I experienced. I expected a luxurious entrance environment and ample parking as it is mentioned on their website. Besides the small piles of rainwater littered around the front vicinity of the hotel, there were also scattered pieces of litter at the back of the parking lot. I also expected a luxurious tinge and gloss of the windows and the entrance, but this was not the case. Instead, the window panes were grimed with dust, and small streaks of dirt possibly left behind in the previous cleaning exercise which clearly did not meet the required standards for a luxurious establishment. At the parking lot, the experience was incredibly annoying. The parking spaces were not well labeled for customers arriving to pick their orders and for those who came to have their meals at the hotel. As a result, there was confusion about where customers were supposed to park their cars.

Figure 6: Golden Olive joint.

Additionally, as I exited the car, I expected a warm reception right from the entrance and the parking area. Conversely, there was no one on sight to usher me around and into the reception area of the hotel. From the look of things, the security personnel at the entrance were poorly trained to welcome guests into the premise and usher them out too. As a matter of fact, I had to remove my belongings from the boot of the car. Only after I had picked my item did the hotel porter arrive and hastily attempted to help me with my luggage without offering greetings. Demonstrably, this was not a proper way making up for their failure to provide warm reception right from the entrance. This was not only annoying, but it also made me unwelcomed at the restaurant. Nonetheless, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and proceeded to the reception area.

M.O.T. # 1- Reasons for Occurrence and Possible Operation Corrections. The first issue arose with the exterior appearance of the restaurant. Evidently, it did was disorganized and dirty. From the online demonstrations, one would expect a very clean and serene environment at the front space of the restaurant. Additionally, I expected that there would be no litter around the compound of the restaurant and behind the parking area in the restaurant. Possible reasons for the occurrence of these is that the restaurant management might have thought that this area is brief for the customer and therefore did not need a lot of attention in organizing and putting trash at the right place which is totally out of sight for the customers. It is imperative to know that the atmosphere at the restaurant matters a lot to the customers and as such should always be kept in the best condition as possible. It is possible that the managers are not aware of the findings of a study conducted by Molina-Azorin et al. (2009) which indicated that hotels which show a stronger commitment to environmental practices have proved to reach higher performance levels.

Additionally, staff tasked with the responsibility of cleaning the restaurant environment may have neglected their duty. This could have resulted from a weak corporate culture practiced by the restaurant in which there is no emphasis on ensuring that the restaurant environment is in the best state at any given time. The piles of water around the restaurant compound is a clear indication that the restaurant lacked a proper waste and rainwater drainage system. It was therefore hard for all the rain and wastewater to drain via the right water channels resulting in th...