Service Management Report: Impact of Culture on Customer Service

This report delves into the significance of service management in the competitive hotel industry, emphasizing the crucial role of organizational culture in delivering high-quality customer service. It highlights how employee cooperation and a supportive organizational culture, as exemplified by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, contribute to a competitive advantage and financial success. The report examines the impact of open, diverse, and teamwork-oriented organizational cultures on service quality, employee motivation, and the ability to meet diverse customer needs. It contrasts these positive aspects with the limitations of closed or homogenous cultures. The Ritz-Carlton is presented as a best-practice case study, showcasing its commitment to employee empowerment, diversity, and teamwork to provide exceptional and customized customer service across its global operations. The report references key academic research to support its analysis and recommendations.

Running head: SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Service Management
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1SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Introduction
In today’s competitive business environment, the quality of service delivery has become
the most significant concern for the hotel industry. Providing high quality service can help the
hotel companies to gain high level of competitive advantage with beneficial financial
implication. However, quality service delivery requires full commitment and cooperation of all
employees in an organization. The culture of an organization supports in building employee
cooperation by eliciting unified response from the employees (Hogan & Coote, 2014). Likewise,
effective organizational culture of Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company facilitates it in supporting the
quality hotel services to be rendered to the customers. This study will discuss the relationship
between service and organizational culture. Moreover, the study will consider Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Company as a case of best practice in forming organizational culture leading to effective
customer service.
Organizational Behavior
In an open organizational culture, the employees are free to open up themselves with
their innovative ideas about customer service. Hence, the employees become highly motivated
and committed to implement such innovative ideas towards high quality customer service.
However, in a closed organizational culture, the employees are limited within the traditional
ways of customer service, which can limit the innovative ways of service quality as per changing
needs of the customers (Lonial & Carter, 2015). In case of Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, the
employees are given enough freedom to identify the service issues and come up with innovative
ways of service quality to be provided to the customers (The Ritz-Carlton, 2018). In this way, the
hotel has been recognized as the gold standard of customer service.

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In diverse organizational culture, the diverse workforces are capable of identifying
different needs and demands of the customers uniquely. Hence, the organizations having diverse
organizational culture are capable of providing customized service quality as per the unique
needs and demands of the customers (Valmohammadi & Ahmadi, 2015). However, in
homogenous organizational culture, the employees are not capable of identifying the needs and
demands of customers having different backgrounds. It can prevent the organizations to provide
customized service leading to poor service quality to be provided to the customers. In case of
Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, the hotel hires diverse workforces for recognizing customized and
unique needs of the customers (The Ritz-Carlton, 2018). Hence, the hotel is highly capable of
providing unique and customized service to different customer group in 30 different countries.
Good teamwork organizational culture maximizes involvement level of the employees.
Moreover, in teamwork organizational culture, the employees can even share their expertise
knowledge with each other (Hogan & Coote, 2014). Hence, the organizations can provide
effective customer service from the core of expertise the knowledge of the employees. However,
in individualistic organizational culture, the expertise knowledge of the employees is limited
within individual employees hindering to implement best customer service. In case of Ritz-
Carlton Hotel, the good team of employees produces wide range of effective customer services
through collective inputs of the employees.

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References
Hogan, S. J., & Coote, L. V. (2014). Organizational culture, innovation, and performance: A test
of Schein's model. Journal of Business Research, 67(8), 1609-1621.
Lonial, S. C., & Carter, R. E. (2015). The impact of organizational orientations on medium and
small firm performance: A resource‐based perspective. Journal of Small Business
Management, 53(1), 94-113.
The Ritz-Carlton. (2018). The Ritz-Carlton. Retrieved 21 March 2018, from
http://www.ritzcarlton.com/
Valmohammadi, C., & Ahmadi, M. (2015). The impact of knowledge management practices on
organizational performance: A balanced scorecard approach. Journal of Enterprise
Information Management, 28(1), 131-159.