Abstract
Working in the hotel industry in Taiwan, I get to be at the front line of receiving the honored guests in a five-star hotel. Every little service matters in providing a satisfying stay and leaving a pleasant impression on our customers so as to create a long-standing brand name and business reputation. Since 1998, the government has opened up to tour groups and guests from mainland China. Therefore, the market of Taiwan's hotels is expected to grow. Many local and overseas hotel branches started to invest on this growing market, ready to construct new hotel buildings in new locations. However, concerning the local management styles and industry development, it's still a huge challenge to strike a balance between commercial benefits and providing stable and high-standard services. "Service" seems to have been defined as abstract and unmeasurable behaviors, related closely to 'human' qualities. That explains why the service industry emphasize on people talents who may play a crucial role in providing high-quality services and acquiring customer satisfactions. However, while new challenges are lying ahead for our industry, we will need innovative approaches and tool development to ensure that our services remain competitive. Therefore, we once again review the service blueprint brought by G. Lynn Shosatack twenty years ago. According to Bitner, Ostrom, and Morgan (2007), the tool in their research has made impressive progress during the past 20 over years, bringing concrete advantages of service innovations. "Service Blueprinting" is a scheme that depicts a top-down service sequence, including customer behaviors, front-desk personnel behaviors, back-stage personnel behaviors and support process. The purpose of the blueprinting scheme is to offer the service industry an overview point, translating this idea to every related employee that service is an undivided unity so as to help them understand their role in the service sequences and make shape of better customer-oriented services. Feeling that the running of the service industry in Taiwan is often short of proper scientific tools, in this research I aim to apply the "service blueprinting scheme" to a major hotel in Taiwan: R Hotel. This research will record what reactions and feedback would be acquired during the process and conclude the application benefits, conflicts and influences. Having compiled physical service blueprinting operations in R Hotel, we may say that the blueprinting scheme does bring values to the hotel employees, customers and the business owners. Through the operations, the contact point between the customers and the service staff are better defined so that service quality control and improvement is more easily achieved with full participation of every related personnel. More importantly, through the value points confirmations, resources will be re-arranged in order to create the best values for the employees, customers and the company. Keywords: Service Blueprinting, Hotel industry, Action Research