You need to research the company (London Zoo), establish its current situation, identify a current issue, analyze it and give justified recommendations. Reference following Harvard referencing style.
The London Zoo
Zoological Society of London is also known as the ZSL was formed in the year 1826 by Stamford Raffles. The public zoo was opened to the public in the year 1947 for getting aid and funding. Major expansions were made to the Public Zoo in the year 1926 for providing accommodations for new zoo animals.
London is one the main tourist spots which account for about 150 millions of tourism days per years. It makes the tourist spots and authorities to get the competitive advantage to attract domestic and international visitors (ZSL, 2018).
Current Situation
The Zoo of London operations depends on the level of service quality and the customer satisfaction. There have been studies which have sought to look at the level of service quality provided by the London Zoo. A study measured the quality of service by the gap between the expectation of the customer and its perception. Another study measures it by the perceived quality of customer.
The problem at the Zoo of London, which has been identified is the lack of operational efficiency. The management and operation of the zoo have crashed in the past with the increase in the expected number of visitors. Management of London Zoo had also announced “Save my Zoo” campaign to gather funds after failing to meet expenses. This campaign, which was expected to help the management, resulted in complete chaos after it attracted thousands of visitors per day. Queues were lined everywhere; there were parking problems, lack of enough food in the restaurants and visitors were lost in the chaos. The decline in the visitor numbers can be attributed to the increase in the number of other entertainment and leisure places in London, and the ease of travel leading lower domestic visitors.
In the last decade after decades of no work and continuous shutdown, the management of the Zoo has done some development work. The public appreciates the more awareness towards the rights, ethics, and laws for animals and the focus towards the sustainability. The sustainability aims like using reusable plastic bottles, planting of indigenous trees, have increased the goodwill of the company (ZSL.Org, 2018).
Identification and Analysis of Current Issue/Problems
The need for better Customer service
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- Unnecessary staff
- Trash generation and unnecessary expenses
The layout of the Zoo entrance towards the Ticket Boxes is very confusing for the visitors. The availability of the vacant ticket boxes is not easy to assess. Furthermore, the process of ticketing can be automated.
The Snack Bar, on the other hand, has an inadequate number of workers. The same workers are serving food which is dealing with the Payments. It leads to longer queue ad waiting time.
The exhibitions always tend to have clutter with no signage of closed exhibitions and path for following. The order to be followed and right lighting is not appropriate for the exhibitions. Furthermore, the exhibitions are also not attended by any staff to provide answers to the questions of the visitors about animals or to address their concerns.
Recommendations
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- One effective solution for the ticketing office can be to replace the old ticketing system and introduce interactive ticketing machines which would help reduce excess staff.
- Furthermore, the streamlining of the positioning of the ticketing machines can make the ticketing process easier and faster.
- These excess staff can be trained to be positioned at other positions which need staff and more employees.
- Automation and relevant software and machinery can be found or developed for the long-term development of the management and operational process of the Zoo.
- Lean Techniques can be used by the management to use closed exhibitions and providing the visitors with more easy routes.
- Relocating of staff to cafeteria and exhibitions from the ticketing point after installation of the ticketing machine
- The company can also look for changing its process type of continuous model to batch model.
- Assigning of photographers to take photos of visitors and then provide these photos to visitors at the end of their visit by using the barcode assigned to them at the start of the visit.
- Pictures which are needed to be printed should be printed to reduce less use of paper.
Conclusion:
The management and operations can be improved by consideration of customer satisfaction, and innovation in the services. There would likely be costs associated with the mentioned recommendations; however, the yielding results would be incremental to the customer satisfaction and service quality.
References:
ZSL.Org, 2018. ZSL Annual Report 2016-17. [Online] Available at: https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/media/2017-11/ZSL-Annual-Report-2016-17.pdf [Accessed 4 April 2018].
ZSL, 2018. ZSL Strategic aims. [Online] Available at: https://www.zsl.org/about-us/strategic-aims [Accessed 4 April 2018].
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