Marketing Module 9
Experience Qualities
Experience qualities are service consumer encounters that occur during delivery of the service. Things to consider are: Appeareance Promising a positivvev experience Settling Realistic Expectations
Gap Anaylsis
A gap analysis measures the gap, using market research techniques, between what customers want and expect to receive, and what is actually delivered. If you think about the range of services provided to you, it's not hard to find many areas in which gaps might occur. Consider your experience with a bank. Suppose you have to visit a branch to deposit a check. Your experience starts with when you pull into the parking lot. If the lot is full, rundown, and ringed with trash, your experience is already altered before you even set foot in the door.
Variability
A major characteristic of services-their quality may vary greatly, depending on who provides them and when, where, and how.
Perishability
A major characteristic of services-they cannot be stored for later sale or use.
Examples of Gap Anaylsis
Addresses managers who might not comprehend customer desire. Encourages training to avoid dissatisfied customers. Marketing research is used to measure the difference between customer expectations and actual service.
Credence Qualities
Credence qualities assess what happens after the service is delivered. Did consumers get what they were promised? There is a large element of trust when we deal in services, more so than in the marketing of products. For example, people trust their accountant to have the knowledge and ability to file their taxes appropriately. When people hire a lawyer to represent them in court, they trust their lawyer has full knowledge of the law and works to their advantage. If an engineering firm is hired to build a new bridge, people trust it is built to the proper safety specifications. Credence is clearly linked with trusting in the value of the services rendered.
Examples of Critical Incident Technique
Customer complaints are used to identify trouble areas. Example includes an electric company that listens to customer reports of outages to target the outage area. Sometimes leads to the decision to discontinue service for problematic customers.
Special Treatment
Disintermediation has become such an important part of services marketing these days that sometimes if you want a personal interaction, companies require that you pay more for it. For example, some companies charge you to talk to a person to get your problem fixed, but offer you free online help or automated messages. Other companies treat you differently. If you are an elite customer at a bank, you might be ushered into a private room with no waiting and be offered a cup of coffee while the banker behind the desk helps solve your problem.
Disintermediation
Disintermediation is the concept of reducing the contact between the customer and the service provider with the goal of removing the chance for a negative impact and granting the consumer more control.
INseparability
Inseparability means that it is impossible to separate the production of a service from the consumption of a service. The service has to be consumed in the moment. You can, for example, stock up on toilet paper because it is on sale, and you know that you will use it eventually. And although you can reserve the services in advance, you cannot, for example, stock up on haircuts or massages.
There are four primary characteristics of services,
Intangibility Perishability Variability Inseparability
Discontinuing Customer Ties
Of course, as with anything dealing with customers, complaints sometimes border on the ridiculous. If a customer demands treatment over and above what is considered to be normal, the company might decide to discontinue the customer's service. Let's use the cell phone service industry again as an example. Suppose there is a customer who uses the phone only one to two times per month, but makes nine calls to customer service each week that last for more than 20 minutes. Because this particular customer barely generates any revenue, and drains customer service resources by making frequent calls to customer service, the company might drop the customer because it would be more profitable without serving that particular customer.
Intangibility
The concept of service intangibility is related to the fact that a service cannot be seen, touched, or tasted.
There are three primary qualities that drive how quality is perceived by the buyer
Search qualities Experience qualities Credence qualities
Search Qualities
Search qualities are those things that can be assessed prior to the purchase and that help buyers make up their mind about what to buy.
Critical Incident Technique
The second way to assess quality service issues is by using the critical incident technique, which relies on customer complaints to identify problematic areas. Many companies have sophisticated tracking software that registers and monitors customer complaints. Consider cell phone services. The most efficient way to know whether there is a problem area that lacks coverage is to look at what customers are complaining about. If, for example, the corridor between Route 11 and Highway 32 generates hundreds to thousands of complaints to customer service regarding dropped calls, a responsible service company would resolve the coverage problem.
Services Continuum
The services continuum shows the progression from a tangible product (like salt) to intangible services (like a university degree).
Quality Problem Identification
There are basically two ways for businesses to assess quality in services marketing. One is a gap analysis and the other is a critical incident technique.
Failure to Deliver
There can also be gaps between what the firm promises to deliver and what is actually delivered. This is different from our initial example, in which the company did not know what the customer desired. In this type of gap analysis, the company knows what is required, and makes promises to deliver the service, but fails to do so. Good companies know that unmet expectations hurt the company.