Customer Service Excellence

The diagram above outlines the customer service gap. Customer satisfaction refers to a person’s belief on the service provided to the. It describes whether the services accorded to them was a success or was it a failure. The expected service on the other hand refers to what your consumer wants whereas the perceived services is what they feel they have received. The gap is what Nordstrom Inc. is striving to close. Business enterprises should strive to ensure that customers receive what they expect(Nordstrom & Lattin, 2008). They should lay down procedures or steps that will aid in closing up the gap that exists.

Service quality is referred to a valuation of how good a delivered service meets the customer’s expectation. Upper management

Service quality - refers to difference between the level of service that is expected from consumers and the perception of the service that is actually received. (Caruana,

The Gaps Model of Service Quality was originally developed for application in the financial service sector. The model was

The gap between expected and perceived service is a measure of service quality. Fitzsimmons & Fitzsimmons (2001) stated that measuring this gap through the customer feedback process is standard practice for leading service companies.

The second Provider Gap, The Service Design and Standards Gap, is finding the middle ground, or understanding, of the customers’ expectations and meeting that with service quality specifications that employees can execute (Zeithaml et al, 2009). Virgin Mobile USA had to be able to provide uninterrupted phone service and tangible items that provided recognition of their brand to customers. Their phone service should be reviewed and compared with competitors’ services to ensure relevancy of their services to potential customers.

This report describes a dissatisfying service incident and analyses the incident helping to develop recommendations for the serviced provider. The report integrates the description of an incident, a critical analysis of the incident, including and examinations of the service quality gaps model. Customer gap: dimensions, types of encounters and sources of displeasure and Providers Gaps 1, 3 and 4. The objective of this report is to analyse the critical incident description and provide a comprehensive service marketers’ analysis of the critical incident. Through this report recommendations have been made for the firm in order to reduce eliminate and or/ better manage the factors that led to

Customer satisfaction and service quality are the two important components that direct anyone’s attention in every concept related to marketing, services, etc. (Spreng and Mackoy, 2006). In today’s competitive era, the success lies in

Service Quality as described by (William G. Zikmund, 1993) “is the degree to which the performance of service provider’s matches customer expectations. It can also be defined as those essential characteristics of a service that measures its excellence”.

Gap 1: Consumer expectation vs. management perception gap. This gap is manager group doesn’t even know what are customer needed. They should read customers complains and change their service. Gap 2 Management perception vs service quality specification gap. Sometimes manager know they have problems and mistakes when they serve their guests. But they don’t change it may because they don’t have a good manager team. Gap 3: Service quality specifications vs service delivery gap. Managers may know what guests need and they changed their service better. But when employees deliver service that still cannot be perfect. People made mistakes and managers should train their employee avoid mistakes. Gap 4: Service delivery vs external communications gap. Hotel give excellent image to customers. But when they deliver their service customers don’t feel same as their expectation. Gap 5: expected service vs perceived service gap. This one is the gap that include all other 4 gaps. When managers and employees bridging the gaps and it can help them deliver better service and products. Made more added value in their

Sometimes the service offered by a company doesn’t satisfy customers’ requirements. In order to join up with customers’ concept, managers can refer to Service Gaps Quality. There are 5 main gaps.

The knowledge gap for Sephora is almost non-existent as they have offered the right product for their target market and are well stocked on the product assortments. The gap happens when the company incorrectly interpreted customer’s expectation resulting in meeting wrong or non-existing customer needs which does not happen for Sephora at all as they are thriving in the industry gaining more and more customer loyalty and attracting new customers. Policy gap reflects company’s management translation of service policy to rules and guidelines for employees. Sephora is translating customer expectation into service delivery quite well as customers are seeking products from Sephora rather than other retailers. There is clearly a gap between service quality specification and service delivery in terms of employee performance. Some of the customers have experienced beauty advisors lacking knowledge and information on the products which resulted as difficulty in managing their questions and issues. Moreover, dissatisfaction also arises from the waiting time a customer has to wait before being served as mentioned earlier. Sephora may reduce this gap by improving their service policies as well as regularly train their employees. Next is the communication gap in which Sephora seems to have communicated well through their advertising media channels which includes e-mails, in-store communication, newsletter and social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube with over 33

26. Customer service 27. Every customer service encounter they experience. 28. False. This misinterpretation of customer service would be far too costly and would quickly overwhelm an organization’s resources. 29. Left unmanaged, customer expectations quickly exceed the resources and capabilities of even the most successful service desk. 30. (1) Promising more than they can deliver. (2) Delivering more than they promised, which raises the bar on customer expectations. (3) Promising one thing and delivering something else. (4) Not promising anything specific, leaving the customer to set expectations.

Think about a service that you receive regularly and put yourself in the wish mode. How would you change the service and the way it is provided?

In today’s world, the service sector dominates the different economies of developed and developing nations. Services require different management activities, “it differs a lot from the marketing of goods” (Berry, 1980). Indeed, services are considered as intangible, variable and perishable (marketingteacher.com). Thus, we can say that the traditional 4 p’s are not sufficient anymore. Indeed, the service marketing mix should now include three other elements, which are the physical evidence, the people and finally, the service process (learnmarketing.net). In addition, we can say that the marketing of goods is not as critical as the management of services quality, which occurs through the monitoring of customer satisfaction. In contrary to the marketing of goods which is more focused on the physical product component, services require a certain customer loyalty, this implying having good service marketing skills.