Report on Service Standards in Singapore Cinemas

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

In 2005, Prime Minister Lee Hsian Loong called for improving the service culture in Singapore in his National Day Rally speech. The Standards, Productivity and Innovation Board (SPRING Singapore) thus highlighted that the new competition is to Ѓgmove from service quality to service excellenceЃh. To examine whether service levels have improved and how to achieve service excellence, several sub-committees were set up under Mr. Christopher FernandezЃfs authorization to evaluate different industries. We are from one of the sub-committees that evaluate the customer service in entertainment industry, which includes cinemas, theme parks and museums.

Being in a small country with very limited natural and human resources, entertainment as a service industry plays an important role in spurring the economy of Singapore. The local media industry alone had an annual turnover of $10 billion, contributing 1.56 per cent to SingaporeЃfs GDP and employing 38,000 people. Cinema industry is a significant component of it.

With four companies dominating the market, Cathay Cineplexes, Eng Wah Organization, Golden Village and Shaw Organization, there are nearly thirty cinemas in this small country. Besides, this small island state has the highest movie-going rate in the world, which is 8 times per person per year. It is therefore crucial for us to improve our customer service consistently in this sector so as to keep its competitiveness, and provide more value-added services to customers in the future.

1.2 Purpose

Our groupЃfs task is to focus on the customer service provided by cinemas in Singapore. This report aims to evaluate how well the service level in these cinemas meets customersЃf expectations, to identify specific problems and the causes of these problems, and to suggest ways to improve from achieving service quality to service excellence.

1.3 Scope

We focus on examining the customer service in Golden Village and Eng Wah. These two companies are chosen because they have the most number of cinemas in Singapore. As Japan is well known for its high level of customer service, we will compare with Japanese cinemas in some aspects to find out ways to improve.

1.4 Research Method and Sources

We gave out 80 surveys to respondents at Eng Wah cinema in Suntec city and Golden Village cinema in Marina Square. These two locations are chosen because they are uptown areas with more customers. The survey asked for ratings from 1 to 5 (1 being very dissatisfied, and 5 being very satisfied) on various aspects of customer service. Short interviews were conducted with some NUS students who had worked in cinemas before to support our findings. Besides, a focus group research was conducted with some exchange students from Japan in order to find out the customer service level in Japanese cinema and the differences in customer services between Singapore cinemas and Japanese cinemas. In addition to our findings, we have tested on our own some of the alternative ticket purchasing system, and did some observational research in the cinemas. Some secondary online data are also used to support our analysis.

1.5 Limitation

Due to limited time and manpower, we were not able to give out our survey forms at all the cinemas in Singapore. We were also facing the problem of not being able to interview the managers or staffs of the cinemas to find out reasons for some problems and this leads to limitation of our information.

1.6 Report Organization

In following sections, this report will discuss and analyze our findings in different areas of customer service and finally come up with our conclusion and recommendations.

2. FINDINGS

Our findings focused on the following problematic areas: waiting time in queue, efficiency of staff, attitude of staff and alternative ticket purchasing method. We will not touch on the other areas such as information counter and response to complaints made by customers since they are generally less problematic.

2.1 Overall satisfaction of the customer service

Figure 1

The very first question of our survey is about the overall satisfaction of the cinema customer service. From Figure 1, we can see that there are 32.5% of the respondents giving a rating of Ѓe4Ѓf and 10% of the respondents giving a rating of Ѓe5Ѓf, which is very satisfied. However, there are more than half (53.75%) of the respondents rank it at Ѓe3Ѓf. Ѓe3Ѓf may be considered as meeting customersЃf expectations only. With around half of the respondents giving the overall satisfaction of the customer service an average score, it shows that Singapore needs to improve more to achieve service excellence.

2.2 Efficiency of staff

Excellent customer service acknowledges that time is valuable to customers. Short queuing time is therefore desirable. However, long queues in cinemas are common during peak hours, like Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. Hence, we decided to investigate the efficiency of handling the queues at ticket counter, Food & Beverage counter and ticket checking in cinemas during peak hours and identify any problems.

2.2.1 Average queuing time at ticket counter

Figure 2

As shown in figure 2, 53.75% of the respondents are able to get their tickets within five minutes and 46.25% of the respondents have to wait more than five minutes at ticket counters. Indeed, seven respondents pointed out that the main problem of the customer service is the long queuing time at the ticket counters.

Through our interviews with the students from Japan, we found out that on average they spent only 1 or 2 minutes at ticket counter. The short queuing time can be attributed to the wide usage of online booking in Japan. Most of the Japanese cinemas have cooperated with convenience stores to provide an easy and convenient ticket-purchasing method for their customers. People can book tickets online first. Then they can go to a ticketing machine in the convenience