chapter 13 (

Which of the following situations best illustrates how a firm can offer employees emotional support and stand behind the employees' actions?.

At a copy center, part-time employees are encouraged to turn over any unhappy customer to the supervisor immediately.

Jane has multiple managers at her retail job. It is company policy that customers cannot return items without a receipt, but sometimes managers will allow customers to receive store credit for their returns. One day a customer was irate that Jane would not allow a return for store credit because the manager on duty adhered to the company policy. The customer wrote a complaint about jane to the corporate office. What needs to change about this situation?

The support that managers provide must be consistent and coherent throughout the organization

Which of the following characteristics is NOT one that distinguishes services from products?

Volatility

An important element of offering emotional support to employees is to ______ when they have been empowered to make decisions in dealing with the customer

avoid punishing them

In addition to empowering and rewarding service providers, as well as offering instrumental support, service managers are advised to Blank______.

be consistent and predictable in their support

An effective method to assess customer service expectations is to analyze customer ______ behavior in which management is told by buyers what dissatisfies them.

complaint

In delivery of a service, one of the most important early steps is addressing the knowledge gap, or the ability to understand Blank______.

consumer expectations

Service quality is defined as:

customers' perceptions of how well a service meets or exceeds their expectations

One method to recover from a service delivery problem is to provide Blank______ fairness, by which customers perceive they are getting an equivalent return for the inconvenience they suffered when the service was not delivered as expected.

distributive

If a customer issues a complaint about poor service but is compensated in a way that he or she feels offsets the inconvenience of the service failure, the customer has received Blank______.

distributive fairness

Lisa is a manager at a customer service call center for a footwear manufacturer. One of the customer service representatives, Mark, is upset because he just finished a call in which the customer berated him for the poor quality of a pair of shoes. Mark is worried that he may be punished for offering the customer a refund and a 20% discount on her next pair of shoes, but Lisa reassures him that he made the right decision and tells a few jokes to get his spirits up. What type of support is this

emotional

anet had to deal with a very difficult customer who wanted to be given complimentary services such as free flights and upgrades on future flights when he very vocally complained in the airport about delays and lost luggage. He screamed at Janet and was very offensive. Her supervisor made Janet feel a little better about the unsettling experience by offering ______ support and commending her on how she handled the difficult passenge

emotional

A continuing dilemma for marketers of services is to understand buyers' __________, which means to understand in advance what they think will be delivered based on their previous experiences and knowledge.

expectation

One of the best ways for managers to reduce the ______ gap is to conduct ongoing research and regularly talk with employees to explain what customers expect to get from the brand and the firm.

knowledge

The marketing manager needs to communicate with customers and employees on an ongoing basis in order to understand buyers' expectations and to reduce the Blank______ gap.

knowledge

One of the problems in using customer complaint behavior to assess buyers' service expectations is that ____

managers often are more concerned with resolving the complaint than analyzing the essence of the problem

One of the traits of service marketing is Blank______, meaning the service must be delivered at a specific time or it is lost.

perishability

Customer ________ refers to human or mechanical activities undertaken by firms to help satisfy their customers' needs and wants.

service

t/f To assess service quality, it is necessary to understand both customers' perceptions and their expectations.

true