In this work the foundation of the proposal is made to use the customer satisfaction indicator as an indicator of productivity and thus achieve greater certainty when it comes to seeing productivity as a measure of worker performance, while simultaneously It also proposes, on this basis, the use of the relationship between the satisfaction of the external client and that of the internal client, which would also facilitate being able to estimate the degree of efficiency that is achieved with the expenses made with a view to increasing the performance of the workers.
Usually by productivity is understood the relationship between the production obtained in a process and the factors put to contribution to obtain that result.
An essential first step for this precise definition of productivity is the measurement of both the results and the contribution factors, which requires the units of measurement, inputs and outputs to be previously determined.
When when determining productivity, the unit in which the obtained result is measured is not the same as the one used to measure the contributed factors, productivity is obtained with respect to those factors.
Productivity must always be expressed in the units with which its components have been measured. The factor against which productivity is measured always comes in the denominator. Thus the expressions: Ton / Kw, Ton / man-hour, Ton / m2 will measure the productivity of a process with respect to the energy, labor and space factors, respectively.
Although, as you can see, the productivity indicator can refer to any of the factors that intervene in the production process. It is very common that when talking about productivity in general it is understood that it is the productivity of the workforce, since this has been used at all times as a measure of the degree of performance and the potential to increase the profits of the workers. Productive processes.
Productivity has been expressed as the relationship between the outputs of the process and the number of workers who directly or indirectly intervened in achieving them, outputs are usually expressed in physical units or their equivalent in value (price).
However, at present, in light of the macroeconomic changes that are taking place, the value of productivity is not always synonymous with performance, since it can increase or decrease and not precisely due to changes in business performance.
When the price of final production increases as a result of market changes, productivity tends to increase even when the internal yield, seen in physical units, has decreased, or on the contrary when what increases is the price of the raw material and It is not feasible, for market reasons, to increase the price of the product, if the production volume remained constant, the productivity of the company was maintained and the business performance was lower.
Specifically in the tourism sector, using productivity as an indicator of worker performance is less favorable due to the forms of commercialization of this type of product, in the first place the volume of people to whom services will be provided will not be determined by the effort of the workers but of those in charge of marketing the product, who often do not even belong to the organization, on the other hand, most of the time the service has already been sold at a fixed price so that any effort made by the Staff for increasing the consumption of products within the service will only contribute to increasing expenses without affecting income.Under these conditions, it would be idle or fictitious to divide income by the volume of workers, since in reality they have done little to make it higher.
However, as evidenced by studies carried out (2), there is a high correlation index between the satisfaction achieved in customers as a result of any service process and the degree of satisfaction of the workers.
For the reasons described above, the idea arose of using the client satisfaction indicator as an indicator of productivity or performance for tourist services. The proposal is based on the following reasons:
- Any product or service intended to be acquired by a customer must produce a level of satisfaction in this and therefore it can be considered an exit from the process. The degree of satisfaction that is achieved will always be directly proportional to the effort of the process personnel. An improvement in satisfaction is a very likely announcement of a better performance in the future due to the increase in the number of customers. An increase in satisfaction generally results in an increase in customer expenses and therefore higher revenues for the process. be the common satisfaction for any type of process, provided that similar scale is used for its measurement, it is possible to use it to be comparative studies and develop improvement programs.
When the unit of measurement adopted is the same for the numerator and denominator of the productivity expression, it is common to use the yield denominator, expressed as a dimensionless quantity.
If it were decided to accept the idea of measuring productivity through customer satisfaction and also instead of dividing it by the number of workers, it was done by the value of their satisfaction, then the return on what was invested in achieving could be known the satisfaction of the internal client, since, as is known, the latter directly conditions the satisfaction of the external client and the outputs.
The application of both ideas would allow to have a more precise indicator of the performance of the workers in addition to being able to evaluate the efficiency of the expenses made in terms of stimulation and training of the personnel as well as contributing to the improvement of the quality of the services.
Bibliography
1. How to improve productivity in the workshop. Castanyer, Francesc Figueras 1999 ALFAOMECA GRUPO EDITOR, SA de CV MARCOMBO, SA, Barcelona, Spain.
2. Customer satisfaction an indicator of productivity. Noda, Marcia. 1997, Holguín, Cuba
