Abstract
Customer satisfaction has been demonstrated to be one of the most important issues in most service industries, particularly the hospitality industry. Therefore, virtuous customers' review of services is critical for organizations. Providing top-quality services leads to satisfied customers. This study attempts to assess how customer satisfaction can be achieved in the hospitality industry. This is detrimental to the hospitality industry and emerging countries economy such as South Africa's. However, few empirical studies have explored and built models to help hospitality companies achieve customer satisfaction.
Consequently, this research investigates and develops a model that will assist the South African hospitality industries in achieving customer satisfaction. More importantly, the research modelled the extent to which service quality, employee commitment, perceived value pricing, customer expectation, employee education and training and digitalization predict the hospitality industry customer satisfaction. A conceptual customer satisfaction model was developed based on the theory developed from the literature review and the findings thereof. A questionnaire survey was conducted in different bed and breakfast in the hospitality within Gauteng province, South Africa to validate the conceptual model. The hospitality industry customer satisfaction is the set of attributes (factors) that will assist the hospitality industry to surpass their counterparts.
Results from the investigation belong to three comprehensive areas. Firstly, the results related to theory on hospitality industry customer satisfaction studies. The findings were that the study addressed the lack of theoretical information about which factors are most significant in predicting customer satisfaction in the South African hospitality industry. Furthermore, the data supported the hypothesis that customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry is multifaceted, with latent variables leading to outcome variables that may be used to quantify customer satisfaction.
The second set of results related to the field questionnaire survey. Generally, the findings were that service quality, employee commitment, perceived value pricing, customer expectation, employee education and training and digitalization predicted customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. The third set of findings related to the SEM Study. The findings from the SEM study indicated that hospitality industry customer satisfaction could be a six-factor model defined by the influence of service
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quality, employee commitment, perceived value pricing, customer expectation, employee education and training and digitalization. More so, the structural equation modelling results on the model’s goodness-of-fit and the statistical significance of parameter estimates met the cut- off criteria for the hypothesized model’s fit to the sample data.
The study’s contribution to the body of knowledge is significant because it addresses the lack of theoretical information (historical literature data) about which factors are most important in predicting customer satisfaction in the hospitality industries of developing countries. The present integrated model advances that hospitality customer satisfaction is a six-factor construct, with the inclusion of two new variables, employee education and training and digitalization. Previous studies have tried to model customer satisfaction using other variables without the inclusion of the present two additional variables. Thus, this study has shown that there is more than one factor that influences industries' customer satisfaction.
The study recommends that governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as hospitality industry policy makers should consider the empirically tested constructs as they plan for and implement customer satisfaction and capacity-building programs designed to enhance the hospitality customer satisfaction in South Africa and other developing countries Similarly, the validated conceptual model of hospitality industry customer satisfaction will provide a reference for researchers who may be interested in studying customer satisfaction in the future.