ASPECTS OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN ...

Annals of the University “Constantin Brâncuşi”of Tg-Jiu, No. 1/2008, Volume 2,
ISSN: 1842-4856
The personalizing of the strategy for serving the clients is very much based on continually
educating the work forces for acting with responsibility under stress circumstances, in order to satisfy
the clients’ requirements.
Within the air transport industry the moments of truth for a certain company are represented by
the contact(s) between the company’s clients and employees, having an average duration of 15-20 sec.
This short time interval is enough for the failure of a strategy for serving the clients. This is the reason
why, when the clients directly contacting the clients are better trained, they would better face the
situation created. In order to become a model company, a certain company has to first prepare and train
its employees in a suitable manner. They should deeply understand everything related to serving the
clients in relation with the company’s products and services. The companies having the best practices
within the field had in view, like: Walt Disney Company, East Jefferson General Hospital or Hyatt
Hotels, start training their employees at the very moment of employing them. They search for highly
motivated persons to provide very good service to their clients, having very good communication skills
and enthusiastically answering to the company’s main values. Such companies offer continuous
training by their own institutions, very much like real universities, numerous training courses and
seminars being offered to the employees.
Big companies and their orientation towards serving the client have learnt that solving problems
and keeping loyal clients has got its own “University”, where the employees are given advice related to
the way they should behave and communicate with the clients and they are trained within the hotel
management field and related to the management of the fundamental rules in human interactions – like
establishing visual contact and greeting the customers smiling. Such courses of the company, as well as
the one named “Service Plus”, deal with certain special problems raised by the clients and with the
methods for subsequently avoiding them. To make such courses more efficient, the company
systematically gathers opinions, complaints, requests and demands coming from the guests. Whether
these are received by phone, by the Web Site or by individual inquiries they will always be taken into
account. In the year 1995, the people from Hyatt initiated an inquiry involving 800 clients of each of
the 98 hotels and the company has built a data base including almost 140,000 opinions related to
certain problems of the services granted by its hotels ever since and to make sure that such complaints
would not be repeated they are sent by fax to each hotel’s manager. Every month an interdepartmental
team led by one of the vice-presidents discusses one of the problems raised by the guests and tries to
offer the best solutions for solving such problems. Each of the company’s hotels receives a copy after
such solutions established by the above-mentioned team and gives copies of it to the employees.
The clients must feel that their complaints and suggestions are heard and that measures are
taken in this respect, and their opinions are not going to be thrown away.
The companies with the most practices also take into account the way of shortening the time
between the moment they receive a complaint and the moment it is solved. Hyatt Company is
conspicuous for the very short period of time it leaves between the two moments mentioned before. For
example, a certain client traveling with business reached the Hyatt Hotel in Denver, but, being hurried,
he forgot to make reservation for the room he would have liked.
Going into the room he had been given, on the television screen a message from the company
welcomed him, inviting him to express his opinion related to the company’s services or to acknowledge
any problem. Using the remote, he fulfilled all the instructions and to his great surprise and delight, in
less than five minutes the hotel’s manager called him by the phone to tell him that although all the
rooms were taken and his room could not be changed, he could offer him a present on behalf of the
hotel, so that he could more easily take that inconvenience. The client was pleased with his present, but
he was even more pleased by the way he had been treated and the very short time in which he got the
answer to his demands. By all means he would have liked his own employees to be just as prompt. In
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