Food quality came out as the only one of nine factors being tested that had a significant effect on intent to return for 239 diners at an Irish-pub-style full-service restaurant in the southeastern...

The Relative Importance of Food, Atmosphere, and Fairness of Wait: The Case of a Full-service Restaurant

It is widely recognised that the tourist market is not homogeneous. Yet segment-specific satisfaction analysis has received inadequate attention both from researchers and managers. Focusing on tourists’ dining experiences, this study investigated whether tourists could be grouped into distinct segments; whether the composition of variables determining customer satisfaction differed among the identified segments; and whether market segmentation strategy could contribute to more parsimonious satisfaction prediction models. Factor analysis was performed to determine dimensions that are likely to influence tourist restaurant selection and evaluations, whereas cluster analysis was employed to identify homogeneous groups of respondents. Multiple regression analyses were then employed to examine the relative importance of service dimensions in determining satisfaction judgments of each segment. Based on the analyses, five distinct dining segments were identified. Different sets of service dimensions appeared to ...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Atila_Yuksel/publication/247764508_Measurement_of_tourist_satisfaction_with_restaurant_services_A_segment-based_approach/links/00b7d52e28a8a6c045000000.pdf

Measurement of tourist satisfaction with restaurant services: a segment-based approach.

Can SERVQUAL-traditionally an instrument for measuring service quality- be proven as an effective tool in assessing customer perceptions of service quality in restaurants? The research presented in...

Measuring Service Quality in Restaurants: an Application of the Servqual Instrument:

We analyze a large, detailed operational data set from a restaurant chain to shed new light on how workload defined as the number of tables or diners that a server simultaneously handles affects servers' performance measured as sales and meal duration. We use an exogenous shock---the implementation of labor scheduling software---and time-lagged instrumental variables to disentangle the endogeneity between demand and supply in this setting. We show that servers strive to maximize sales and speed efforts simultaneously, depending on the relative values of sales and speed. As a result, we find that, when the overall workload is small, servers expend more and more sales efforts with the increase in workload at a cost of slower service speed. However, above a certain workload threshold, servers start to reduce their sales efforts and work more promptly with the further rise in workload. In the focal restaurant chain, we find that this saturation point is currently not reached and, counterintuitively, the chain can reduce the staffing level and achieve both significantly higher sales an estimated 3% increase and lower labor costs an estimated 17% decrease.

This paper was accepted by Noah Gans, special issue on business analytics.

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When Does the Devil Make Work? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Workload on Worker Productivity

Over the last 20 years we have witnessed the emergence of a large‐scale, world‐wide academic movement concerned with the management of services. This paper charts the role and impact of operations management on this movement and proposes that the current key focus for service academics should be with the application of frameworks and techniques. Also suggests that as the service movement has grown, with increasing overlap between the subjects of operations, marketing and HRM for example, there is a need to “return to roots”. Contends that service academics, in their bid to develop cross‐functional service management material, may have lost, or inadvertently ignored, the strength of their core disciplines. Re‐focusing on the traditional strengths of operations management, such as performance quality, design, and operational improvement, might help provide a greater rigour to the developing subject of service management. Discusses nine areas for service operations research and suggests specific research questions. The topics include linking operational performance to business drivers, performance measurement and operations improvement, service design, service technology, the design of internal networks and managing service capacity.

Service operations management: return to roots

Today, people are dining out more often than at any time in the past. Restaurants that hope to benefit from this trend must realize that the restaurant's environment, services, and service delivery should conform to customers' expectations

Gavin B. Maurer

Papers

A walk-through audit to improve restaurant performance