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Shaari, Nordin & Fongservice encounter with customers; hence, influencing customers’ satisfaction be itpositively or negatively. As the quality of services that customers encounter might bedifferent each time they visit a particular hotel, their level of satisfaction could also beaffected that eventually would influence their re-patronage intentions.This research focused on assessment of guest’s satisfaction towards hotel personnelservice quality and its effect on customer re-patronage intention in the hotel industry.Following this introduction, the paper discusses on related literature, suitablemethodology, findings and discussion of the study, and it wraps up with the implicationand conclusion of the study.2. Literature Review2.1 Service Quality, Employee Performance, Customer SatisfactionAt the peak of rivalry, quality is seen as a useful tool in improving productivity in theorganization and become the key strategy to achieve and maintain competitiveadvantage. Harris (2000) stated that one of the most effective and cheapest ways tomarket a business is through providing excellent customer service. The key tooutstanding service delivery lies in the interaction between service employees andcustomer, commonly referred as service encounter. It is a critical part of the servicedelivery process because it greatly impact customers’ evaluations of whole serviceexperience (Soloman et al. 1985).Many services organizations, particularly in this case of hotels require personalinteractions between customers and employees. These interactions would stronglyinfluence the customers’ perception of service quality (Rust, Zahorik & Keiningham1996) as it serves as signs of quality and value to customers. Service quality is a centralissue in services marketing and has been discussed in a number of writings (e.g. Lewis& Booms 1983; Gro¨nroos 1984) even before the well-known SERVQUAL research byParasuraman et al. (1985). Gro¨nroos (1984) postulated two types of service quality:technical quality (i.e. what the customers actually received from the service), andfunctional quality (i.e. the manner in which the service is delivered). Later he proposedthat service quality can be described in terms of professionalism and skills, attitudesand behaviour, accessibility and flexibility, reliability and trustworthiness, servicerecovery, servicescape, reputation and credibility (Gro¨nroos 2000).Employee performance is an element of functional quality on how the service isdelivered. Poor employee performance will lead to customer dissatisfaction andbehavior such as customer complaints and likelihood to switch to other service provider(Kozark & Rimmington 2000). On the other hand, when employee gives commendableperformance such as serving with a smile, it helps to improve the perceived servicequality, customer satisfaction and thus increase the intention to re-patronage in thefuture.63
2.2 Customer Re-Patronage IntentionShaari, Nordin & FongCustomer re-patronage intention is conceptualized as customer likelihood to revisitservice provider (Hellier et al. 2003). In the post-purchase phase, consumer evaluatesservices and decides whether he/she will develop ongoing relationships with the serviceprovider. There are overwhelming arguments that it is more expensive to win newcustomers than to keep existing ones (Ennew & Binks 1996; Hormozi & Giles 2004).This is in line with Athanassopoulos, Gounaris & Stathakopoulos’s (2001) argument thatcustomer replacement costs such as advertising, promotion and sales expenses arehigh and it takes time for company with new customers to become profitable.Furthermore, the increase of retention rate could also imply greater positive word ofmouth (Appiah-Adu 1999), decrease price sensitivity and future transaction costs(Reichheld & Sasser 1990) which would lead to better business performance (Fornell1992; Bolton 1998).2.3 Effect of Service Quality on Re-patronage IntentionStudies and theoretical evidences in literatures suggest that there is direct link betweenservice quality and behavioral intentions (Bitner 1990; Bolton & Drew 1991). Among thevarious behavioral intentions, considerable emphasis has been placed on the impact ofservice quality in determining repeat purchase and customer loyalty (Jones & Farquhar2003). As pointed out by Bolton (1998), service quality influences a customer’ssubsequent behavior, intentions and preferences. When a customer chooses a providerthat provides service quality that meets or exceeds his or her expectations, thecustomer is more likely to choose the same provider again. Other studies whichsupport that repurchase intentions are positively influenced by service quality includeZeithaml, Berry &Parasuraman (1996); Cronin & Taylor (1992, 1994); Cronin, Brady &Hult (2000) and Choi et al. (2004).3. MethodologyA set of self-administrated questionnaire in English with Malay translation wasdeveloped. The questionnaire comprised of three sections. The first section gatheredrespondents’ demographic data, the second on items respective to measure employeeperformance and attitude, and the third on customer re-patronage intention with a fivepointLikert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) utilized. 300questionnaires were distributed to respondents who have stayed in three star and fourstar hotels in Kuching, Sarawak. This meets the ratio of observations to independentvariables of minimum 5:1 by Hair et al. (2006) that also fit with Sekaran (2007) thatstates 30 to 500 samples should be sufficient for most studies. 267 questionnaires werecollected and found usable, giving a quite good response rate of 89 percent.64
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