Quality management - hospitality industry perspective

Abstract

Good Morning and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you our experiences at American Express in striving to achieve total quality management. The travel industry, as we are all aware, is growing by leaps and bounds. To remain competitive and profitable, we all strive to provide our customers with quality service delivered consistently. This is much easier said than done and in order to achieve this goal, companies have invested hundreds and thousands of dollars. American Express is no different and we recognized that we had to put in place a system that would ensure quality service. We began our quality journey at American Express in the late 1970s when we first introduced performance standards for our internal processes. Over 100 service measures were introduced which monitored our performance. Basically, we looked at the speed and accuracy of our responses to customers. We measured how quickly we processed new applications, what percentage of charges we authorized, and how timely and accurate our responses were to Cardmembers billings inquiries.