• Service Management Trinity Pdf
• Service Marketing Triangle Pdf Examples
• Service Marketing Triangle Pdf Templates

ADVERTISEMENTS:The need for extension is due to high degree of direct contact between the firm and the customer, the highly visible nature of the service production process, and simultaneous production and consumption of services.The Service:Physical products can be inspected and tried before buying but pure services are intangible. A customer cannot go to a showroom to see a medical operation that he is considering. This means that customers of services suffer higher perceived risk in their decision-making process. ADVERTISEMENTS:They do not know whether they have purchased the right service until they have used it and in some cases like medical service and car service, they cannot be sure whether they have received the right service long after they have consumed the service.The three elements of the extended marketing mix—people, physical evidence and processes provide clues about the quality of the service to the customer, and are crucial in influencing the customers’ perception of service quality.Brand name of a service can also influence the perception of a service.

It is sad that service providers do not expend necessary resources and efforts in building strong brands. In situations where customers are unsure of the quality of their purchases, strong brands provide an assurance to customers that the company has a history of good quality. ADVERTISEMENTS:Customers spend lot of time, money and effort in ascertaining the likely quality of service they propose to buy and the providers do the same in assuring the customers of high quality of their offering. Both parties would be greatly served if service providers build strong brands.Customers would be less unsure of the quality that they will get. Besides promoting its service, a provider should provide high quality of services consistently so that customers talk about it favourably.

A strong service brand is built by a combination of advertising and positive word-of- mouth publicity. Both are necessary.Positive word-of-mouth publicity without being supplemented with advertising will create a strong local brand. Customers from distant locations would not be attracted to it.

Advertising without being supplemented with positive word-of-mouth publicity will create awareness but customers will still look for affirmation from customers who have actually used the service.For some services, trial is possible. Some hotels invite key decision makers of communities to visit their hotels free of charge to sample the facilities and services. The hotels hope that they will recommend the hotel to their members. ADVERTISEMENTS:The intangible elements of service are difficult to communicate. It may be difficult to represent courtesy, hard work and customer care in an advertisement. The idea then is to use tangible cues that will help customers understand and judge the service.A hotel can show the building, swimming pool, friendly staff and happy customers.

Service Management Trinity Pdf

Testimonials from satisfied customers can be used to communicate service benefits. Personal selling can also be effective in services marketing because of the high perceived risk inherent in many service purchases.A salesperson can explain details of a personal health plan can answer questions and provide reassurance. Because of high perceived risk inherent in buying services, sales people should develop lists of satisfied customers to be used in reference selling. Sales people need to be trained to ask for referrals.Customers should be asked if they know of other people or organizations that might benefit from the service. The customer can then be used as an entry and point of reference when approaching and selling to the new prospect. Word-of-mouth publicity is critical to success because of the experimental and experiential nature of services. Talking to people who have visited a resort is more convincing than reading holiday brochures.

ADVERTISEMENTS:Personal influences play a dominant role in the choice process of services. Therefore, it is important that the service provider takes deliberate steps to engender word-of-mouth communication.A company can follow the following approaches:i. A company can persuade satisfied customers to inform others about their satisfaction. The company can identify customers who have been especially pleased with its service and maintain relationships with them by offering them special deals.The customers are subtly asked to recommend the services to people they know. The company can have schemes in which it rewards customers who recommend and introduce others to their service. But such schemes should be played down because prospective customers will be wary of such recommendations if it comes to be widely believed that companies pay for eliciting recommendations.

In any case the rewards should just act as triggers.Customers should feel that the service is worth recommending. And not many customers would be willing to stake their reputations for paltry sums, i.e., it is unlikely that a customer will recommend an inappropriate service to his friend or relative.ii. A company can develop materials that customers can pass on to others. Customers who are extremely satisfied with services of a particular provider recommend the provider to their acquaintances because they genuinely feel that the service provider is good and they feel that they will be helping out their friends by recommending a genuinely good service provider.When a company leaves information material with their most satisfied customers, it becomes convenient for them to pass on information about the service provider to their friends. It is very convenient to send such information via email.iii.

A company can target opinion leaders in its advertising campaign. Heavy users of a service are good prospects. Corporate clients of repute can also sway opinions in the provider’s favour. Celebrities are useful in this context if they are not involved with too many endorsements.iv. A service provider encourages potential customers to talk to current customers.

Educational institutes find this exercise very useful. Prospective students seek out current students to find facts about the institute. They trust current students to give true information.When current students talk well about the institute, prospective students’ inclination to join the institute increases.Opportunities have to be created for current and prospective students to meet. But the effectiveness of this exercise is based on the belief of the potential customers that current customers do not have any interest in projecting a false image of the institute. But when such exercises are doctored, they lose their credibility.Communication should also be targeted at employees because of their importance in maintaining and creating service quality. Internal communication should define management’s expectation from employees, reinforce the need to please the customer and explain the rewards that follow from giving excellent service.External communication that depicts service quality also influences employees if they include employees and show how they take exceptional care of their customers.

Care should be taken not to exaggerate promises in promotional material since this may build up unachievable expectations among customers.Such exaggerated promises also demotivate employees and makes them cynical as they know that the company is not in a position to live up to its promises. It is very important that the employees like the way their company is projected to the outside world, so that they feel proud of being a part of it and strive to live up to the promises made in the advertisements.

ADVERTISEMENTS:Price is an important tool in marketing of service. Since it is often difficult to evaluate a service before purchase, price acts as an indicator of perceived quality. For example, a patient expects a surgeon to charge high fees, otherwise he cannot be good.Price is also an important tool in managing demand. Bars charge higher rates in the evenings when they expect a lot of rush.

They charge lower price during day­time expecting some customers, who otherwise would have visited in the evenings, to visit during day­time due to the lower prices. Less number of customers have to be turned away in the evening.Low prices can also attract new customers who cannot afford to or do not want to pay the high prices charged in the evenings. The facility is more evenly utilized throughout the day. Matching demand and supply is critical in services because services cannot be stored.A less utilized facility at some part of the day or year means lost revenue which cannot be compensated.

But the price differential has to be significant to be able to shift customers, as enjoyment of some services is closely related to the time at which they are consumed. ADVERTISEMENTS:The experience of watching a movie in a theatre at the weekend is very different from watching it on a weekday. People would prefer going to a hill-station in summers than at any other time of the year.Price sensitivity is a key segmentation variable in service sector. Some customers are willing to pay a much higher price than others.

Time is often used to segment price sensitive and insensitive customers. Long-distance phone calls are cheaper at some part of the day than others.Some customers may be willing to pay more to get the service early or whenever they want it. It is often debatable if a patient willing to pay more than the normal fees should be allowed access to a doctor before another patient who has been waiting for his turn.But it is slowly being accepted that customers who pay more can have faster access to the service. But the discrimination has to be done in a discreet and subtle manner, especially when both set of customers are in the same place, as it often happens in entertainment parks, where two queues of guests move at different paces toward the rides.The guests who pay more are in the faster moving queue and wait for less time than those who pay less. It is often wise to design facilities and operations in a way that the two sets of customers are not in sight of each other.Five techniques used when setting fee levels are as follows: Offset:A company charges low fees for the core service but charges higher prices for other add-on services. A restaurant may charge low price for food but will charge higher prices for drinks.

But after a while customers would know the provider’s tactics and customers who are primarily interested in having meals would be visiting but customers who want to enjoy their drinks will look for a place which follows the opposite practice. An entertainment park may charge low price for rides on swings but may charge high price for food. Inducement:A company charges low fees to attract new customers or to help retain existing customers. Since price is a strong cue for quality in services, low price may make the customers believe that the quality of the service is not good. Divisionary:A company charges low basic fees on selected services to develop the image of a provider which offers value for money. The services with low prices should be accessed more often by customers. The price of other services should not be very high as customers will then be able to see the price discrepancy between the services.

The low priced services give an image of being low-priced but the very high prices of other services will make the customers suspicious about the true nature of the service facility. Guarantee:The company allows the customers to pay the full fee only on achievement of agreed results. Most customers are generous enough to pay for the service that they have already consumed though they may not be fully satisfied with it.They will crib about the deficiencies in the service at the time of paying and will be assuaged with polite words. There is not much loss of revenue due to this clause. But in-spite of most customers not availing the ‘no-payment if not satisfied’ option, they feel nice having the option and normally trust such providers to provide good service.

Providers who give such guarantees make more efforts to provide fault-free services and their operations become better. They become more alert. Predatory:The company charges low prices to undercut competition’s fees to remove them from the market. They plan to charge higher fees when competitors quit. But the events following a player’s price cut does not normally follow this script.

Competitors too reduce their price and a few adventurous ones among them even undercut the initiator. The result is low profits for every player in the industry. Place:Distribution channels for services are more direct. There is no storage of services. Production and consumption is simultaneous, and hence direct contact between customer and service provider is essential for most services.

Growth for many service companies means opening new facilities in new locations, due to simultaneous production and consumption. The evaluation of locations is a critical skill for such services.Expansion often means a multi-point strategy because the whole setup for service production and marketing has to replicated. Success of many service providers has been due to their ability to choose profitable new sites and replicating their operations at the new sites.New technologies permit service companies to provide services without customers coming to their facility.

Information and financial services are leading this revolution. A customer can carry out transactions with a bank through ATMs, Internet, or the phone. Information products can be widely distributed through Internet.But there are many other services where contact between the provider and the customer is still essential. But service companies should be looking for an alternative to personal contact with customers for at least a part of the service.Should education be provided solely through teacher-student interaction in a classroom or can at least a few of these sessions be substituted by a recorded lecture? Should a patient visit a doctor each time he feels unwell? Or can he have a monitoring system at his house which can transmit information about his body’s functioning to the hospital, from where a doctor will prescribe medicines over the phone?It is not being suggested that all this is possible.

But service companies should be experimenting with various alternatives to deliver services. Personal contact between a service provider and a customer is costly, cumbersome and full of interpersonal complications. If it can be avoided without sacrificing customer satisfaction, it should be. People:Service quality is inseparable from quality of service providers. The company has to set standards to improve quality of service provided by employees and monitor their performance.

Without training and control, employees tend to be variable in their performance leading to variable service quality. Training is crucial so that employees understand the appropriate norms of behaviour.A service provider trains its employees to identify and categorize different personality types of customers, and to modify their behaviour accordingly. Employees need to know how much discretion they have to talk informally to customers.They also need to control their own behaviour so that they are not intrusive, noisy or immature. They need to adopt a customer-first attitude rather than putting their own convenience and enjoyment before those of their customers.Employees of service organizations have to be adept in multiple roles. They have to be good in their primary task and they have to be good in interpersonal skills. They also should have empathy to judge the service requirement and mood of the customer, and modify their service and behaviour accordingly.A service professional has to have the combined skills of an operations man, a marketer and a human resource manager.

Service Marketing Triangle Pdf Examples

It is not easy to find employees with such diverse skills.The company has to examine the role played by customers in service environment and seek to eliminate harmful interactions. The enjoyment of a restaurant meal or air travel will depend upon actions of other customers as well.The service facility’s marketing mix should be such that it attracts customers desiring similar benefits from the provider. The target market has to be very homogeneous and the positioning very precise. Physical Evidence:Physical evidence is about the environment in which the service is delivered and it includes any tangible goods that facilitate the performance and communication of the service. Customers look for cues to have an idea about the likely quality of a service by inspecting the tangible evidence.Prospective customers may peep through a restaurant window to check the appearance of the waiters, the decor and the furnishings. The layout of a service operation has to balance the operational need for efficiency and marketing desire for effectively serving the customer.Customers do not know what is in store for them when they decide to consume a service as they cannot examine it before using it. The whole facility is important to the customer as a source for cues, by which he will try to gauge the quality of the service he is going to consume.Service providers should research the concerns of the customer regarding the service and also find out the cues that the customer will be searching to get an idea of that part of the service which is of concern to him.

The service provider should strengthen those cues. Process:These are the procedures, mechanisms and flow of activities by which a service is delivered to customers. Self service cafeteria is very different from a restaurant. The company needs to research the requirements of its customers and set its processes accordingly so that the required service is delivered. Since requirements of customers vary widely, processes cannot be standardized.But if a process is allowed too much flexibility, the efficiency of the facility goes down. Therefore customer requirements should not be allowed to vary widely.

Through targeting the smaller segment of customers, variations in their requirements can be controlled.The process is important because in some services, they are visible to customers. Sometimes the effectiveness of a process can be compromised in the effort to make it look good to the customer. Some patients feel good when they are extensively examined by the doctor though it may not be necessary.Some processes in personal grooming and hair care saloons are not really required but service professionals have to carry them out because customers have come to expect them.Classroom lectures are largely ineffective but students will feel that they have not been taught at all if such lectures are not held. The idea is that customers have to be educated about the need or irrelevance of certain processes. A process should be employed only when it is required to provide a service and not because customers have come to expect it.

Service Marketing Triangle Pdf Templates

A that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. Its production may or may not be tied to a physical product. Furthermore, service marketing can be defined as the marketing of activities and processes rather than objects. As services are mainly intangible products, they face a host of services marketing problems that are not always adequately solved by traditional goods-related marketing solutions. Services Marketing TriangleThe services marketing triangle was created to handle the complexity that service marketers face when dealing with intangible products. The service marketing triangle highlights three key players, these are;.

Company: The management of a company, including full-time marketers and sales personnel. This is enabled through continuous development and internal marketing with their employees. Employees: This includes anyone that is working within close contact of the consumer. They play an integral role within the interactive marketing of service marketing. Customers: Anyone that purchases the service of a company. They are also heavily exposed to the external marketing of a firm.For marketing to be successful, a marketer should ensure that there is positive interaction between these three players. Furthermore, for this success to be accomplished, three types of marketing must be conducted.

External Marketing – Making Promises: Involves communication by a company towards their consumer. This form of communication allows the company to offer their services, and set the expectation of service quality that the client can expect.

In service marketing this pays particular attention to physical evidence, such as the appearance of the place of business or appearance of staff. Interactive Marketing – Keeping Promises: Interactive marketing is revolved around the communication that occurs between the client and the service delivery personnel. This is one of the most important parts of successfully utilising the services marketing triangle, as it is the only time that the client will have face-to-face experience with the company, via the providers. Internal Marketing – Enabling Promises: A more modern addition to the services marketing triangle, internal marketing centres on training employees to the highest standards so they can deliver exceptional service. Without internal marketing, there is a high chance that the client will receive sub-standard service.For the service marketing triangle to be implemented successfully, all departments of a company must work together to deliver the highest that is possible. All members of an organisation must be conscious of their role in, and understand what their marketing function is.Furthermore, the advancements in technology are having a huge impact on service quality and marketing frameworks. This is because the changes in technology are allowing companies to communicate with customers in a non-physical environment, such as through the internet.

This is transforming the services marketing triangle into a services marketing pyramid, as all three factors can be bought together through the clever use of technology.One of the most significant downfalls to the service marketing triangle is that firms often do not implement it as a triangle. Instead they will focus on one point of the triangle, and neglect the others. This is particularly true to internal marketing, as many organisations believe that if employees are treating correctly, then it will naturally pass through into the external environment. However, the fact that all three points are woven together, and influence by each other, does present opportunities’ for organisations to conduct their marketing efficiently and at a cheap cost.Another criticism of the service marketing triangle is that it takes into account to many marketing activities. Marketing is used merely as a tool to coerce a consumer to purchase a good or service, and an organisation shouldn’t have to focus on all three aspects of triangle. As service quality is impacted by each individual point of the triangle, an organisation could, theoretically, only focus on one point. However, as previously mentioned, this can have unintended impacts on other facets of the triangle, meaning that an organisation should strive to monitor and implement all three points of the triangle, instead of focusing on only one.