From the collected data, it was evident that the main factors considered by the customers in terms of service quality revolved around four subjects. These areas of concern are the physical appearance of the place, the kind of food offered, the variety of foods in the menu, the type of service provided by the staff, and the pricing of the food. Most of the respondents found something positive about the physical appearance, considering it was a fine dining restaurant. On the other hand, the service of the staff and the quality of the food served received a lot of criticism from the customers as they did not meet their expectations. As such, appropriate recommendations were made at the end of the research that would assist the restaurant in meeting customer expectations and retaining its economic competitiveness.
A lot of research has been carried out in the field of hospitality (Lane, 2014). According to Rush (2008), it has been noted that many industry players are no longer concentrating on the speed at which they expand their hospitality companies and businesses, but at the rate at which they meet customer expectations. There has been a great need for maintaining customers in restaurants following the rapid increase of fine dining restaurants, and the key winner is the level of service quality.
It is important to identify the fact that customers’ perception of the service quality of a business determines the level to which they are satisfied. Therefore, a business should be careful in setting the customer perceptions as they affect their expectations. The level to which these expectations are met determines the service quality of a place through either satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a customer. These two states are quantified from the experience of a client in the business through incidents that they undergo (Ford, Sturman, & Heaton, 2012).
The critical incidents technique is used to identify these experiences for individual customers.