KFC Corporation (KFC), founded and also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is a chain of fast food restaurants based in Louisville, Kentucky, in the United States. KFC is touted to be the world’s No.1 Chicken QSR and has leadership position across many countries like UK, Australia, South Africa, China, USA, Malaysia and many more. KFC is the largest brand of Yum Restaurants, which also owns other leading brands like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, A&W and Long John Silver.
Get Help With Your Essay
If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!
Renowned worldwide for its “finger licking good” food, KFC has introduced many offerings for its growing customer base in India while maintaining the taste legacy of Colonel Harland Sander’s secret recipe. Apart from its standard signature dishes which are offered worldwide, KFC also offers vegetarian dishes in India. In India, KFC is growing rapidly and has presence in 21 cities and around 107 restaurants.
Quality management at KFC recognizes is fundamental dichotomy by using two complementary programs for measuring quality:
- The quality, service, and cleanliness (QSC) program for judging the quality of service outcomes from the perspective of a customer. This program is designed to measure and evaluate quality at each KFC restaurant, company owned or franchised, from the viewpoint of a customer. “Mystery shoppers,” independent individuals contracted by KFC, evaluate the quality, service and cleanliness of each restaurant. Mystery shoppers are well trained to use the standard QSC form so that they perform each evaluation in an objective, accurate, and consistent manner. KFC revises and updates the form frequently to ensure that it reflects the ever-changing customer expectations.
- The operations facility review (OFR) program for measuring a restaurant’s process implementation performance against KFC’s process specifications. The OFR program parallels the QSC program except that the OFR evaluators are KFC employees. KFC trains the OFR evaluators rigorously to ensure that they perform all evaluations in an objective, accurate, and consistent manner.
Service Quality of a Restaurant: Background Information
The services provided by a restaurant are intangible products and it is difficult to establish precise specifications to enable service quality to be standardized.
The critical dimensions of service quality of a restaurant are:
- Reliability - Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
- Responsiveness - Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service
- Assurance - Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence
- Empathy - Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers
- Tangibles - The appearance of physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel
SERVICE quality is an attitude or global judgment about the superiority of a service. To be globally competitive service industries must achieve a quality service that exceeds customers’ expectation. Service quality determines an organizations success or failure. Companies and organizations that virtually every industry employs customer satisfaction measures for the straightforward reason that satisfied customers are essential for a successful business. Service quality also determines a customer’s satisfaction. However, the determinants of service quality are complicated with the dynamic business environment. Therefore, this measurement dimensions depend on the industry itself.
Service quality is influenced by expectation, process quality and output quality; in other words the standards of service is defined by customers who have experienced that service and used their experience and feelings to form a judgment. In order to achieve a quality service organization, commitment from employees and support from all levels of management is necessary. Therefore, it is important for managers who provide goods or services constantly to keep track of information about the company’s well being as far as meeting its customers’ needs are concerned. Service companies are trying to find ways to improve and provide superior quality service to satisfy their customers.
Quality plays a significant role in determining and influencing customer satisfaction. There are many types of food service providers such as hotels, restaurants, canteens and cafeterias. Service-based industries such as hotels and restaurants are spending a tremendous effort to measure and improve the service quality of their businesses. All of them share one thing in common, that is to provide customer satisfaction.
Service satisfaction is a function of consumers’ experience and reactions to a provider’s behaviour during the service encounter; it is a function of the service setting. The level of customer satisfaction may be influenced by various attributes from internal and external factors. Customer satisfaction may be identified as internal and external customer satisfaction of an organization. From the literature review, researchers on external customer satisfaction have been identified. However, there seems to also be dissatisfaction of internal customer satisfaction from organization’s point of view.
Given below are various factors that are considered to determine the service quality of a restaurant:
- How their seat reservation was attended?
- Time taken to obtain and serve drink orders
- The level of willingness to provide attentive service
- Good knowledge of product among the staff
- Employee skills in clearing the table
- Employee skills to serve food and beverage
- Selection of desserts/coffee/tea and time taken to serve and clear
- Ho was the bill presented
- Was the send off Warm & courteous
- Time taken for Delivery
Statistical Process Control
The application of statistical techniques to control processes is referred to as Statistical Process Control, or SPC. Control charts are powerful SPC tools that can identify unusual variation in process activity and thus enable decision-makers to make immediate adjustments to stabilise their processes.
The basic procedure followed is:
- Choice of appropriate control chart for the data.
- Determination of the appropriate time period for collecting and plotting data.
- Collection of data, construction of chart and analysis of data.
Look out for “out-of-control signals” on the control chart. When one is identified, mark it on the chart and investigate the cause. Document how you investigated, what you learned, the cause and how it was corrected.
Continue to plot data as they are generated. As each new data point is plotted, check for new out-of-control signals.
Types of charts
Variables
X-bar and R charts are the most common types of SPC control charts. While X-bar charts are used to control sample means, R charts are used to control variation within samples by measuring range. In other words, the R chart plots the range of each sample, which is the difference between the largest and the smallest observations.
If the observations fall within the upper (UCL) and lower (LCL) control limits, the process is considered to be statistically in control. Changes in the X-bar chart would suggest that the process is generally drifting away from its process average. Monitoring the sample range helps one determine whether the variability of the process is changing.
X Chart (Mean)
An x bar chart is used to monitor the average value, or mean, of a process over time. For each subgroup, the x bar value is plotted. The upper and lower control limits define the range of inherent variation in the subgroup means when the process is in control.
R Chart (Range)
An R Chart is a control chart that is used to monitor process variation when the variable of interest is a quantitative measure. These charts will allow us to see any deviations from desired limits within the quality process and, in effect, allow the firm to make necessary adjustments to improve quality.
C Chart
It generates a counts control chart. A C chart is a data analysis technique for determining if a measurement process has gone out of statistical control. The C chart is sensitive to changes in the number of defective items in the measurement process. The “C” in C CONTROL CHART stands for “counts” as in defectives per lot.
Research Methodology
What today’s restaurant-goers are more concerned is having a high quality experience of dining. They expect the restaurant to have certain atmosphere and entertainment and prefer restaurants with a personality rather than those perceived as offering just a commodity. This study was conducted to check the level of service quality and customer satisfaction and undertakes a service quality assessment of KFC.
Find Out How UKEssays.com Can Help You!
Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs.
View our academic writing services
We went to KFC Kamala Nagar on 8 different days and ordered separately to check out the experiences of each one of us with the restaurant. We checked out the behaviour of working staff, ambience of the restaurant, order accuracy, waiting time, hygiene factor, cleanliness and customer satisfaction and rated them accordingly. Each of the five critical dimensions – reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles were observed with the help of 6 questions each (maximum points that can be attained in each dimension = 30) and the totals were noted for each day. We then made use of the control charts to analyze if the restaurant needs to take any measures to improve the service quality, to reach the level as promised by it.
Results
In X- Chart, since the points are lying between upper and lower control limits except on day 1, it can be concluded with 99.73% confidence that the process is under control. However, there are huge variations in each day. And so, if the method of observation is assumed to be non-faulty, then it can be concluded that the process has chances of becoming erratic.
Since the R-Chart is well within the control limits, the dispersion of the process is under control.
In C-Chart, since all the observations are within the control limits, so with 99.73% confidence, it can be concluded that the number of defects per unit of output are within control.
From the three charts, it can be concluded with 99.73% confidence that KFC is functioning well within quality norms and the process is in control with minor chances of erratic behavior.
Limitations
The research is carried out for only 8 days. There might be some variations observed with large set of data which is not reflected in these results. Due to small data set, there might also be the case that data is much more ideal due to some special occasions in the restaurant. Also, since observation was taken by an individual per day, there is a possibility of some observation error due to personal limitations.
Cite This Work
To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:
