Flow charting 8.

1
 Steps in delivery service
 Understand customer service experience
Blue printing 8.2
 Key activity in creating and delivering satisfying service
 Define “big picture” before “drilling down” to obtain a higher level of detail

Advantages

 “frontstage” & “backstage”

 Interactions between customers and staff (supported by backstage activities and
systems)
 Potential fail points / preventive measures / contingency 应 急 计 划 - to improve
reliability
o Identify fail points and risks of excessive waits
o Set service standards and do failure-proofing
o Have staff poka-yokes and customer poka-yokes
 Pinpoint where the waiting stage for customers is.

Key components

1. Define standards for front-stage activities

2. Specify physical evidence

3. Identify main customer actions

4. Line of interaction (customers and front-stage personnel)

5. Frontstage actions by customer-contact personnel

6. Line of visibility (between front stage and backstage)

7. Backstage actions by customer contact personnel

8. Support processes involving other service personnel

9. Support processes involving IT

Self-Service Technologies 8.5
 Ultimate form of customer involvement
 Information-based services can easily be offered using SSTs
 Many companies seek to encourage customers to serve themselves using Internet-
based self-service
 Challenge: getting customers to try this technology
 Key weakness of SSTs: Too few incorporate service recovery systems

Cognitive marketing
a way to use the brain's ability to think about itself to form a connection with a customer and
create brand loyalty and conversions.

Digital marketers, accustomed to using software that helps them think about marketing, are
now transitioning to a time when software will do much of the thinking. In short Cognitive
Marketing is playing with the human mind in means of human behavior, emotions and by any
kind of human touch by more advance marketing tools and strategies. Cognitive marketing
may even redefine how brands relate to customers.

Service-goods continuum
a continuum with pure service at one endpoint and pure tangible commodity goods at the
other

Marketing theory makes use of the service-goods continuum as an important concept which
'enables marketers to see the relative goods/services composition of total products'.

将人群视为一个整体，每个个体所占的部分是无穷小，个体的贡献以积分(integral)的形

式汇总到整体；个体进行决策时，可以认为整体的决策不受单个个体的决策变化影响

（但是如果有大量个体同时改变决策，则整体的决策也可能会改变）。
Russell’s Model 10.2
Mehrabian-Russell stimulus-response model and Russell’s model of affect help us understand
customer responses to service environments

 Pleasure and arousal

 Approach/avoidance(outcomes)

• Simple yet fundamental model of how people respond to environments

• Feelings drive behavior

• Emotional responses to environments can be described along two main dimensions:
– Pleasure: direct, subjective, depending on how much individual likes or dislikes
environment
– Arousal: how stimulated individual feels, depends largely on information rate or
load of an environment
• Advantage: simplicity, allows a direct assessment of how customers feel
Servicescape 10.2
Fit customer’s expectation

Service environment

 people perceive them as a whole

 people are also part of service environment

Attract and maintain customer

Service environment 10.4
 Shapes customers’ experiences and behavior
 Support image, positioning and differentiation
 Part of the value proposition
 Facilitate service encounter and enhance productivity

Emotional labor 11.2

 the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill
the emotional requirements of a job.
 workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers,
co-workers and superiors.
 Good HR practice emphasizes selective recruitment, training, counseling, strategies
to alleviate stress
Cycles of Failure, Mediocrity, and Success 11.3
Cycle of Failure

 The employee cycle of failure

o Narrow job design for low skill levels
o Emphasis on rules rather than service
o Use of technology to control quality
o Bored employees who lack ability to respond to customer problems
o Dissatisfied with poor service attitude
o Low service quality
o High employee turnover
 The customer cycle of failure
o Repeated emphasis on attracting new customers
o Customers dissatisfied with employee performance
o Customers always served by new faces
o Fast customer turnover
o Ongoing search for new customers to maintain sales volume
 Costs of short-sighted policies are ignored

Cycle of Mediocrity

 Most found in large, bureaucratic organizations

 Service delivery is oriented towards
o Standardized service
o Operational efficiencies
o Promotions based on long service
o Successful performance measured by
o absence of mistakes
o Rule-based training
o Little freedom in narrow and repetitive jobs
 Customers find organizations frustrating to deal with
 Little incentive for customers to cooperate with organizations to achieve better
service
 Complaints are often made to already unhappy employees
 Customers often stay because of lack of choice
Cycle of Success

• Longer-term view of financial performance; firm seeks to prosper by investing

in people

• Attractive pay and benefits attract better job applicants

• More focused recruitment, intensive training, and higher wages make it more
likely that employees are:

• Happier in their work

• Provide higher quality, customer-pleasing service

• Broadened job descriptions with empowerment practices enable front-line staff

to control quality, facilitate service recovery

• Regular customers more likely to remain loyal because:

• Appreciate continuity in service relationships

• Have higher satisfaction due to higher quality

how to get HRM aspect right
• Hire the right people

• Identify the best candidate

• Train service employees actively

• Organizational culture, purpose and strategy

• Get emotional commitment to core strategy and core values

• Get managers to teach “why”, “what” and “how” of job

• Interpersonal and technical skills

• Both are necessary but neither alone is enough for performing a job
well

• Product/service knowledge

• Staff’s product knowledge is a key aspect of service quality

• Staff must explain product features and help consumers make the
right choice

• Empower the front-line

• Firm’s business strategy is based on personalized, customized service and

competitive differentiation

• Emphasis on extended relationships rather than short-term transactions

• Use of complex and non-routine technologies

• Service failures are non-routine and cannot be designed out of the system

• Business environment is unpredictable, consisting of surprises

• Managers are comfortable letting employees work independently for benefit

of firm and customers

• Build high-performance service delivery teams

• Emphasis on cooperation, listening, coaching and encouraging one another

• Understand how to air differences, tell hard truths, ask tough questions

• Management needs to set up a structure to steer teams towards success

• Motivate and energize people

• Job content

• People are motivated and satisfied knowing they are doing a good job

• Feedback and recognition

• People derive a sense of identity and belonging to an organization

from feedback and recognition

• Goal achievement

• Specific, difficult but attainable and accepted goals are strong

motivators
Dissatisfied customers
When customers are dissatisfied, they can

• Take some form of public action

• Take some form of private action

• Take no action

Among all the unsatisfied customers, 7% complaints, the rest of the don’t talk to you
anymore.

Why do customers complain?

 • Obtain compensation

• Release their anger

• Help to improve the service

• Out of concern for others

What do customers expect once they have made a complaint?

• Procedural, interactional and outcome justice

service recovery
• Effective service recovery can lead to customer loyalty

• The service recovery paradox does not always hold true—better to get it right the
first time

• Guiding principles for effective service recovery include

• Make it easy for customers to give feedback

• Enable effective service recovery

• Focusing on how generous compensation should be

services guarantees
• Power of service guarantees

• focus on what customers want

• clear standards

• get & act on customer feedback

• understand why and overcome potential fail points

• reduce risks of purchase and build loyalty

• design service guarantees

• Unconditional

• Easy to understand and communicate

• Meaningful to the customer

• Easy to invoke

• Easy to collect

• Credible

• Types of service guarantees

• Single attribute-specific guarantee

– One key service attribute is covered

• Maldistributed-specific guarantee
 – A few important service attributes are covered

• Full-satisfaction guarantee

– All service aspects covered with no exceptions

• Combined guarantee

– All service aspects are covered

– Explicit minimum performance standards on important

attributes

• Is it not appropriate to introduce a service guarantee when

• Companies have a strong reputation for service excellence

• Company does not have good quality level

• Quality cannot be controlled because of external forces

• Consumers see little financial, personal or physiological risk

associated with the purchase
Jaycustomers
To discourage abuse and opportunistic behavior, we need to deal with customer fraud

7 types:

– The Cheat

– thinks of various way to cheat the firm

– The Thief

– No intention of paying - sets out to steal or pay less

– The Rule Breaker

– The Belligerent 喜欢乱责备，推锅的客人；爱大吵大闹的客人

– The Family Feuders

– People who get into arguments with other customers ― often members of
their own family

– The Vandal 爱搞破坏。搞报复的客人

– Prevention is the best cure

– The Deadbeat

– Customer fail to pay（not intentionally）

– If the client's problems are only temporary ones, consider long-term value of
maintaining the relationship