Service quality | My Assignment Tutor

Service qualityWeek 9Service quality• There are a number of different “definitions” as to what is meant byservice quality. One that is commonly used defines service quality asthe extent to which a service meets customers’ needs or expectations(Lewis and Mitchell, 1990; Dotchin and Oakland, 1994a; Asubontenget al., 1996; Wisniewski and Donnelly, 1996). Service quality can thusbe defined as the difference between customer expectations ofservice and perceived service. If expectations are greater thanperformance, then perceived quality is less than satisfactory andhence customer dissatisfaction occurs (Parasuraman et al., 1985;Lewis and Mitchell, 1990).Exceeding customer expectations• What does it mean?• The phrase ‘exceeding customer expectations’ is very much used inthe hospitality industryService Quality Gaps• There are three important gaps, which are more associated with theexternal customers are Gap1, Gap5 and Gap6; since they have adirect relationship with customers. ·• Gap1: Customers’ expectations versus management perceptions: as aresult of the lack of a marketing research orientation, inadequateupward communication and too many layers of management.• Gap2: Management perceptions versus service specifications: as aresult of inadequate commitment to service quality, a perception ofunfeasibility, inadequate task standardisation and an absence of goalsetting. ·Service Quality Gaps• Gap3: Service specifications versus service delivery: as a result of roleambiguity and conflict, poor employee-job fit and poor technologyjob fit, inappropriate supervisory control systems, lack of perceivedcontrol and lack of teamwork.• Gap4: Service delivery versus external communication: as a result ofinadequate horizontal communications and propensity to overpromise.Service Quality Gaps• Gap5: The discrepancy between customer expectations and theirperceptions of the service delivered: as a result of the influences exertedfrom the customer side and the shortfalls (gaps) on the part of the serviceprovider. In this case, customer expectations are influenced by the extentof personal needs, word of mouth recommendation and past serviceexperiences.• Gap6: The discrepancy between customer expectations and employees’perceptions: as a result of the differences in the understanding of customerexpectations by front-line service providers.• Gap7: The discrepancy between employee’s perceptions and managementperceptions: as a result of the differences in the understanding of customerexpectations between managers and service providers. SERVQUAL• SERVQUAL is the most often used approach for measuring servicequality has been to compare customers’ expectations before a serviceencounter and their perceptions of the actual service delivered(Gronroos, 1982; Lewis and Booms, 1983; Parasuraman et al., 1985).SERVQUAL• It has five generic dimensions or factors and are stated as follows (vanIwaarden et al., 2003):• (1) Tangibles. Physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel.• (2) Reliability. Ability to perform the promised service dependably andaccurately.• (3) Responsiveness. Willingness to help customers and provide promptservice.• (4) Assurance (including competence, courtesy, credibility and security).Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust andconfidence.• (5) Empathy (including access, communication, understanding thecustomer). Caring and individualized attention that the firm provides to itscustomers.Engagement marketing• Many companies now help their customers have a role in theformulation of the services and products they produce. With the riseof the sharing economy, companies like Airbnb and Uber investmillions to empower their customers, who are also their partners, byunderstanding their challenges, listen to their suggestions, and buildsolutions based on their feedback and service experience.Engagement marketing• Internet giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, YouTube, andTwitter, know that their customers are also their partners whogenerate all the content that generates all their revenue. That is whythey all provide their users with publishing tools, content creationguidelines, and a powerful reliable platform to support theircreativity.Services Blueprinting• A lot of Surveys have shown that poorly designed services are themain reason for customers’ dissatisfaction (Shostack, 1984). Thereason is simply because companies spend more resourcesresearching, designing, and developing prototypes for physicalproducts and not for interactive services (Bitner, et al., 2008).Services blueprints• Services blueprints consist of five main components, when studiedcorrectly the company-customer relationship becomes understoodand any issues can be easily spot and mitigated.• The five components are:• 1- Customer actions: documenting all the steps the customers takewithin the service delivery process. For example, all the pages thecustomer views when visiting a website.• 2- Onstage contact employee actions: showing all the interactionswith the company’s front end employees if it is a physical encounterServices blueprints• 3 -Backstage contact employee actions: for all communications thatare not face-to-face, like phone calls, emails, etc. It also includes anyactions done by the employees as a preparation to interact with acustomer• 4- Support processes: highlighting any activity that has a relationshipwith the service process• 5- Physical evidence: represents all the physical items that customersuse while the service is being delivered (Carey, 2008)Finding out information• Surveys but a recent Forrester research showed that 81% ofmillennials do not want to fill an online webform (Casey, et al., 2017).Another challenge is finding a quantitative way to analyse theresponses, read the real sentiments behind the words, and correlatethe responses to the exact delivered serviceChatbot• One of the relatively recent technologies to capture customers’feedback and listen to them without pushing a survey form in front ofthem is the AI Chatbots. Companies can now install a little code ontheir websites, give it some user behaviour scenarios and activate itto show up at the right time to the right visitor and with the mostrelevant script. Users interact with those Chatbots the same way theychat with a real human being.Medallia• Collect customer experience signals across any channel and combineexperience data with operational data to enable a holistic view of thecustomer and all interactions, such as call centre support and bookinghistory.• www.medalia.comElectronic Customer RelationshipManagement• Amazon.com• Once the user creates an account and starts browsing the website,adding items to their shopping carts or their wish lists, Amazon startsbuilding a profile of the user’s interest to make sure that the nexttime they visit, either through a web browser or a mobile app, theysee items of their interest. Also, by giving the customer an account totrack their orders, retrieve old invoices, review products, or evenreturn them if they need to, gives their customers a sense ofcomplete control and increases their level of satisfaction and loyalty.A/B testing websites• A/B testing, or split testing, is one of the best practices in the field ofonline marketing, user experience, and search engine optimization(SEO). Using tools like Optimizely, Google Optimize, Adobe Target,VWO, and many others, users can create different front-end UIs ofwebpages and monitor which one has a positive impact on visitors’behaviour, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rate.