chapter 9

Question 1

company defined standards

Answer 1

they are established to reach internal company goals for productivity, efficiency, cost or technical quality. A current company-defined standard that does not meet customer expectations is the common practice of voice activated telephone support systems that do not allow consumers to speak to humans.

Question 2

sof customer defined standards:

Answer 2

soft measures are those that must be documented using perceptual data. W call the second category of customer defined standards soft standards and measures because they are opinion based measures and cannot be directly observed. They must be collected by talking to customers, employees or others. Tey provide direction, guidance and feedback to employees in ways to achieve customer satisfaction and can be quantified by measuring customer perceptions and beliefs. Soft standards are especially important for persron to person interactions such as the selling process and the delivery process for professional services.

Question 3

One time fixes

Answer 3

when customers reesearch is udnertaken to find out what aspects of service need to be changed, requirements can sometimes be met using one time fixes. One time fixes are technology, policy or procedure changes that, when instituted, address customer requirements. We further define one time fixes as those company standards that can be met by an outlet (a franchisee, for exmpale) making a one-time change that does not involve employees and therefore does not require motivaiton and monitoring to ensure compliance. We include on time fixes in our discussion of standards because organizations with multiple outlets often must clearly define these standards to ensure consistency

Question 4

measuring behaviours and actions

Answer 4

HARD measures for measuring
behaviours and actions consist of counts or audits or timed actions that provide feedback about the operational performance of a service standard. what distinguishes these data from soft measures is that they can be captured continuously and operationally without asking the customers opinion about them

Question 5

developing customer defined standards (steps)

Answer 5

1) identify existing or desired service encounters: Ideally, the company would be open to discovering customers desired customer journey, exploring the ways customers want to do business with the firm

2) translate customer expectations into behaviours and actions for each service encounter: in this step, abstract customer requirements and expectations must be translated into concrete, specific behaviours and actions associated with each service encounter.

3) selection behaviours and actions for standards: This stage involves prioritizing the behaviours and actions, of which there will be many, into those for which customer defined standards will be established.

4) decide whether hard or soft standards are appropriate:

5) Develop feedback mechanisms for measurement to standards: once companies have determined whether hard or soft standards are appropriate and which specific standards best capture customer requirements, tehey must develop feedback mechanisms that adequately capture those standards. Hard standards typically involve mechanical counts or technology enabled measurement of time or errors. Soft standards require perceptual measurement through the sue of follow up satisfaction survey or employee monitoring

6) establish measures and target levels: The next step requires that companies establish target levels for the standards. Without this step the company lacks a way to quantify whether the standards have been met.

7) track measures against standards:

8) provide feedback about performance to employees

9) periodically update target levels and measures

Question 6

Service performance indices

Answer 6

are comprehensive composites of the most critical performance standards. Development of an index begins by identifying the set of customer-defined standards that teh company will use to drive behaviour.

Question 7

not all performance indices contain customer-defined standards, but the best are based on them. Most companies build these indices by

Answer 7

understanding the most important requirement of the customer

linking these requirements to t angible and measurable aspects of service provisions

using the feedback from these indices to idenfity and improve service problems

Question 8

among the issues companies must tackle when developing service performance indices are

Answer 8

the number of components to be contained

what overall or summary measures will be included

whether the index should be weighted or unweighted

whether all parts of the business will be held to the same performance measures