Characteristics of an Effective Service Guarantee
• Unconditional
– The guarantee should make its promise unconditionally – no strings attached
• Meaningful
– The firm should guarantee elements of the service that are important to the customer
– The payout should cover fully the customer’s dissatisfaction
• Easy to Understand
– Customers need to understand what to expect – Employees need to understand what to do
• Easy to Invoke
– The firm should eliminate hoops or red tape in the way of accessing or collecting on the guarantee
Principles of Service Design
1. User-centered: Services should be experienced and designed through the customer’s eyes
2. Cocreative: All stakeholders should be included in the service design process
3. Sequencing: A service should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions
4. Evidencing: Intangible services should be visualized in terms of physical artifacts
5. Holistic: The entre environment of a service should be considered Types of Service Offering Innovations
• Major or radical innovations
– New services for markets as yet undefined
• Start-up businesses
– New services for a market already served by existing products that meet the same generic needs
• New services for the currently served market
– Attempts to offer existing customers a service not previously available from the company
• Service line extensions
– Augmentations of existing service line
• Service improvements
– Changes in features of existing services
• Style changes
Physical Evidence
The environment in which the service is delivered and where the firm and the customer interact, and any tangible commodities that facilitate performance or communication of the service.
How this affects the customer:
• Flow
• Meaning
• Satisfaction
• Emotional connections to company Roles of the Servicescape
• Package
– Conveys expectations – Influences perceptions
• Facilitator
– Facilitates the flow of the service delivery process
• Provides information (how am I to act?)
• Facilitates the ordering process (how does this work?)
• Facilitates service delivery
• Socializer
– Facilitates interaction between:
• Customers and employees
• Customers and fellow customers
• Differentiator
– Sets provider apart from competition in the mind of the consumer Internal Responses to the Servicescape
• Cognition: environment can affect beliefs about a place and the people and products found in that place
• Emotion: color, décor, music, scent affect mood – Pleasure/displeasure
– Degree of arousal (amount of stimulation)
• Physiology: volume, temperature, air quality, lighting can cause physical discomfort and even pain
