Providing Good Service

Service: The intangible product

Service is intangible product like travel, freight forwarding, insurance, repair, consulting, brokerage, education, health care, which can seldom be tried out, inspected, or tested in advance.

Tangible products differ in that they can usually, or to some degree, be directly experienced—seen, touched, smelled, or tasted, as well as tested. Often this can be done in advance of buying. You can test-drive a car, smell the perfume, work the numerical controls of a milling machine, inspect the seller's steam-generating installation, pretest an extruding machine. Another difference between service and products is that services are produced and consumed at the same time, service consumption are inseparable. Satisfaction in consumption or use can seldom be quite the same as earlier in trial or promise. The more human that are needed to provide a service, the more likely that the service's quality will be inconsistent or variable because it is provided by humans. In many cases, problem of a product can be fixed by recall, remade, but an inferior service can't be recalled. By the time the firm recognizes a problem, the damage has been done. Also service are perishable because they cannot be held in inventory or stored for use in the future. The perishability of services provides both challenging and opportunities to marketers in terms of the critical task of matching demand and supply.

Value creation through service

Historically, responsibility for sales creation has sat with the sales force. Yet, what happens when times get tough? What happens when, because of economic uncertainty, or lack of liquidity, customers simply stop seeing sales people at all? If sales personnel don't have the opportunity to create value, the answer must be your service personnel.

Whatever your industry or sector, the chances are that there are people from your organization who have regular and frequent customer contact, even in hard times. These people have many roles and job titles, from the obvious – sales engineers or customer service agents, for example – to the less so, such as audit clerks, nurse practitioners or consultants. Almost every selling organization has some group of customer-facing people who are not in a sales role and, in most cases, you will have more of these service people than sellers. And, when times are tough, these are the people with the most regular and frequent access to your customers.

In addition, it is important to remember that it is not only senior managers or procurement professionals that influence buying decisions. Indeed, when every pound spent is being scrutinized, it is your day-to-day contacts – the customers your service people meet – who are the real judges of your quality, the value you create and the real key influencers when it comes to buying.

However, opportunity is only one of the things needed to create value. Though service may have opportunities in abundance, they may lack the other necessary attributes.

Providing great service

The gaps model of service quality was first developed by a group of authors, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, at Texas A&M and North Carolina Universities, in 1985 . Based on exploratory studies of service such as executive interviews and focus groups in four different service businesses the authors proposed a conceptual model of service quality indicating that consumers' perception toward a service quality depends on the four gaps existing in organization – consumer environments. They further developed in-depth measurement scales for service quality in a later year (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1988).

1) Theory of the Gaps Model

Perceived service quality can be defined as, according to the model, the difference between consumers' expectation and perceptions which eventually depends on the size and the direction of the four gaps concerning the delivery of service quality on the company's side. The key points for each gap can be summarized as following.

· Customer gap (service quality gap): The difference between customer expectations & perceptions

Knowledge Gap:

The difference between what customers expected and what management perceived about the expectation of customers.

Standard Gap:

The difference between management's perceptions of customer expectations and the translation