The impact of customer satisfaction on the hospitality industry in Uganda :

Abstract

The study was carried out with the purpose of examining the impact of customer satisfaction on hospitality industry in Uganda the case study of Brisk hotel in Jinja. The objectives of the research were, to establish the strategies used by Brisk hotel to enhance customer satisfaction, to determine the factors that affect customer satisfaction in Brisk hotel, to examine barriers to satisfaction in Brisk hotel. The researcher applied both qualitative and quantitative techniques in designing the research. A total of 80 respondents participated in the study and were selected using random sampling method. The data was collected using questionnaires and interviews and presented using tables, graphs and pie charts for easy analysis. The research findings revealed that the hotels have adapted to the strategies used to enhance customer satisfaction like holding existing customers, benchmarking which calls for adopting new ways in which other hotels perform their services in order to satisfy customers. The study also found out the factors affecting customer satisfaction are reliability, assurance, price and assurance and in that way, hotels have to make steady assurance and reliability and revise the prices of their services in order to enhance customer satisfaction. The findings also highlighted some of the barriers that have been registered as hindrances to customer satisfaction the major ones being lack of understanding customers’ needs which leads to under delivering of services, overworked staff which tend not to priotize customers’ needs due to too much then having a non-caring culture which doesn’t consider the relevance of the customers. It was however recommended that for the case of overworked staff the hotel should consider employing newable bodied and experienced staff to cater for too many tasks being assigned to the small number of employees of the hotel. The management of brisk hotel should also consider making the working environment empowering to boost them and gain a feeling of caring about their customers and thus make them happy. The lack of incentives, the hotel management should always motivate their employee staff so as to influence them to go that extra mile for their customers, and thus they should always provide rewards, both monetary and non-monetary to ensure its staff is motivated and empowered. For the case of lack of understanding about customer needs, the hotel management should always make sure that there is availability or data to ensure that there it’s easy to make claims that the hotel is customer centric.