EXAM Flashcards
FLOWER OF SERVICE
Information
Order taking
Billing
Payment
Consultation
Hospitality
Safekeeping
Exceptions
PLACE/DISTRIBUTION
What is being distributed?
How and where is it being distributed? (Customer goes to service organisation, single site, self service)
When should services be delivered (traditional business hours)?
Flowcharting
The means of managing and controlling individual parts of the service delivery system, identifying weak points and opportunities for improving or enhancing the efficiency and productivity of the system
PRICE
How much should be charged
Competitors
Customer perceived costs (financial, time and effort, risk)
Collection of payment
PROCESS/CAPACITY AND DEMAND
Defining capacity by resources and assets, or number of people you can serve
Understand demand patterns (e.g. busy before Christmas)
Controlling demand (bookings, 20 min max waiting time, replacing cancellations)
PROMOTION/IMC
Using tangible cues for the intangible product (e.g. service employees, attractive waiting room, clean equipment)
Manage customer expectations
Educating customers (VCR, brochures, consultation)
Internal marketing communications (frontline staff represent the brand, uniform etc.)
PEOPLE
Frontline drives customer loyalty
Service leadership and culture
Middle and top management supporting the top line
PRODUCT
Core service
Flower of service
Service redesign (self service, bundled service etc)
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
Service scape
Consumer response to service environment (sound, colour, equipment)
Physical environment
Services characteristics
Intangibility: can’t touch
Inseparability: cannot separate consumption and production
Perishability: cannot store stock
Variability: never the same outcome
Types of service
People processing (dentist)
Possession processing (car service)
Mental stimulus processing (concert)
Information processing (banking)
Perceived services risks
Functional risk: will the dentist do the job properly?
Financial risk: the dentist is expensive
Temporal risk: long wait times to get bookings
Psychological risk: people are scared of the dentist
Social risk: typical patients are white collar professionals
Sensory risk: noises of machines, things in your mouth
Role theory
Set of behaviour patterns learned through experience and communication, to be performed in an interaction in order to attain maximum effectiveness
Script theory
Structures that guide service transactions and specify the alternatives available to the employees who directly deal with customers (eg dentist receptionist staff)
Control theory
Customers: Service gives a degree of control to the customer, ensuring they feel confident so they won’t have second thoughts (eg dentist explaining procedures)
Staff members: who have a sense of control are more likely to reflect positive delivery of service (training, culture)
Service scape dimensions
Ambient conditions: temperature, noise, music, scent
Spatial layout: layout, equipment, furnishings
Signs/symbols: signage, personal artefacts
Standardisation of service
Standardising routine procedures to reduce error and increase efficiency (eg dentist standardise routine cleans to provide patients with consistent level of care)
Customer defined standards
Concertising customer expectations into behaviours/actions (eg customer prioritises no wait time, so dentist introduced 20 minute policy and calling patients if the dentist is running behind)
Disconfirmation of expectations model
Confirmation: the service matched your expectation (equal)
Negative disconfirmation: service doesn’t meet expectation (expectation is greater than what was received)
Positive disconfirmation: expectations are exceeded
Zone of indifference
The difference between a customers desired and just adequate expectations
The extent to which customers are willing to accept some degree of variation
Can be wider when you have more things to consider (eg looking for a hotel, extremely tired- just want to sleep, don’t care about price, first experience of the hotel, your zone is wider. Will have a different experience if you were not tired and so your zone would be narrower)
SERQUAL dimensions of service quality
A method to measure the quality of your service using the following dimensions:
Tangibles: appearance of physical elements
Reliability: dependable, accurate performance
Responsiveness: promptness and helpfulness
Assurance: competence, courtesy, credibility, security
Empathy: good communications and customer understanding
Diamond of loyalty
Segmenting your current database not target market:
Loyals (dentist focuses on loyals as they provide regular income and are the source of word of mouth communications that attract new clients)
Habituals
Multi branders
Switchers
The customer pyramid
Lead
Iron
Gold
Platinum (the segment that sees high value in the service, spends more with us overtime, costs less to maintain and spreads positive word of mouth)
Customer retention strategies
- Create loyalty bonds: confidence benefits (dentist is reliable and reduces patient anxiety), social benefits (dentist builds social relationships with clients)
- Switching barriers: economic barriers (service features), psychological barriers (social bonds)
- Reduce customer churn: implement effective complaint handling, analyse defections and monitor declining accounts
Customer complaints
Consumers complain to recover some economic loss and/or to rebuild self-esteem
Factors influencing complaining behaviour
- level of dissatisfaction
- importance of service
- cost of complaining
- benefit to be gained from complaining
- access to registering a complaint
How to prevent customers from failing
- collect data on customer failure points
- identify root causes of failure
- establish preventative solutions (redesigning service processes, educating customers)
Service recovery justice theory
Procedural justice: concerns the policies and rules the customer has to go through
Interactional justice: concerns the behaviour of the firms representatives during the complaint resolution process
Distributive justice: (outcome) customer expectations (apology) / compensation for their loss (refund/replacement)
Developing an effective service recovery process
- top management commitment
- develop a complaints as opportunities culture
- training and empowerment
- ownership of the complaint
