Chapter 4: Listening to customers and building relationships

Question 1

Discuss the 3 problems suggested by Grönroos on the disconfirmation paradigm (i.e., measuring comparisons between expectations and experiences for service quality)!

Answer 1

• Timing measurements expectations = in many cases, companies measure expectations of customers AFTER the service delivery. However, the expectations have then been influenced by the service delivery process.
• Experiences impact ex-post expectations = an experience will influence the ex-post expectations of a customer. For example: when someone goes to a restaurant and they enjoy the live music there, their expectations might change to where they expect a restaurant to provide live music. Before this experience, the customer didn’t really expect it.
• Previous expectations impact current expectations = experience is based on prior expectations. So if you measure expectations first, and then you measure experiences – they are related (not independent) and you are actually measuring expectations twice!!

Question 2

What are the main research objectives in the case of services and what type of methods can be used ? Explain using specific examples !

Answer 2

There are many research objectives that companies try to achieve by using big data and all other market research methodologies. These include things like:
- Discover customer requirements & expectations for service = in order to generate customer-driven standards to close gap 3.
- Monitor & track service performance
- Assess overall company performance compared to competitors
- Determine service expectations for new services
- …
There are also some important research activities that are used to reach these objectives, such as:
- Complaint solicitation
- Critical incident studies
- Researching customer needs (via database marketing research)
- Mystery shopping
- Exit surveys or post-transaction surveys
- …

Question 3

What is the “critical incident technique” ? Under what circumstances or for what type of problems can this method be used best ? Explain !

Answer 3

Critical incident technique = a research method in which the research participant is asked to recall and describe a time when a behavior, action, or occurrence impacted (either positively or negatively) a specified outcome (for example, the accomplishment of a given task).
These are generally used:
- To identify ‘best practices’ at transaction level
- To identify customer requirements as input for quantitative studies
- To identify common service failure points
- To identify systematic strengths and weakness in customer-contact services

Question 4

How is the information of marketing research communicated to executives? How does this information reach them?

Answer 4

There are many ways to collect information about customers, however, it is important that this information reaches the right people. There are several ways to do that:

• Executive visits to customers
• Executive management listening to customers
• Research on intermediate customers
• Research on internal customers
• Executive management listening/approaching employees
• Employee suggestion