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Customer Service Quality Concepts A Marketing/Business Perspective (cont'd) |
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Understanding our customers' needs To meet these challenges, we must develop our services or product to exceed the expectations of our customers, to the point where they do become loyal, ensuring that all our supporting processes and distribution systems are efficient and add value throughout. In the delivery of intangible services, such as travel, hospitality, health care or financial services, the balanced approach requires a clear understanding of customers¹ expectations and their perceptions of value as a function of price and quality. Consistent with General Systems practice, this calls for a reliable feedback system. Feedback begins at the 'Moment of Truth,' a cumulative series of experiences, the time and place where the transaction takes place, where services are delivered or used. It is where our customers' expectations are fulfilled, providing them with a basis for judging the usefulness and perceived value and quality of all our services relative to their expectations. It is virtually impossible to satisfy customers or service users if their expectations or value perceptions are not understood to begin with. For customers' judgment of the quality of our services it is important that we understand their meaning of its key characteristics, including its 'reliability,' 'responsiveness,' 'assurance,' 'empathy,' and 'tangible factors.' Although research often tends to rank these qualities, some caution is advised. In practice all five service quality characteristics are required for holistic results, where even the least important tangible factors or empathy, as the first impression we make on customers may have the greatest impact. Today's customers judge service quality on its value and usefulness. As marketing professionals we know or ought to know that customers' buying decisions among competing suppliers are based on value, which in turn is influenced by perceived quality relative to price. Quality in turn includes all non-price attributes, where a clear distinction is made between the core service or product, and its delivery or customer service. Where our understanding of customers' expectations and value perceptions is somewhat lacking, problems will occur as perception gaps at the Moment of Truth. It must become your challenge to keep this gap closed. The Perception Gap is the accumulation of a series of gaps in all areas supporting the delivery of the product or core services. It can be seen that these areas often involve different departments, making a whole-organization approach essential for best results. Shortcomings in these areas can, respectively, result in an understanding gap, i.e., not knowing what's important to customers. Second, there is the service design gap or the arithmetic difference between customers' expectation and their perception of the developed service core. Third, there is the service delivery gap, as the arithmetic gap between customers' expectation and their perception of the delivery of the service. Fourth and last, there is the marketing/communications gap resulting from wrongly targeted or ambiguous communications, often promising more than can be delivered. Each of these areas is affected by, and impacts on, the service quality characteristics described earlier. In acquiring feedback from internal and external sources, consistent with general systems practice, it is also important to distinguish between 'hard' and 'soft' measurements. Hard 'counting' measures focus on finance-, or asset-related cost input data, including budgets, human resources, time factors, outputs, efficiency and sales performance, which are usually easy to obtain, even though several departments may be involved. Soft measures, on the other hand, involve qualitative or subjective feedback concerned with motivation, customer priorities or preferences, expectations, perception, attitudes and satisfaction levels, which are harder to obtain. Ironically, innovation and creativity can often be treated as hard measures. |
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