Service Systems &
Objectives
We need to:
• Understand and Recognising Need for Service Systems.
• Understand the concept of Service blueprint.
• Explain the benefits of service blueprints.
• Recognise Quality Function Development as another effective tool for developing Service Systems.
• Illustrate how to translate customer expectations into specific behaviours and actions.
• Identify the various store and non-store retailing outlets.
• Explain the skills required for Developing Service Systems.
• Explain the skills required for implementing Service Systems.
One of the keys to matching service specifications to customer expectations is the ability to describe critical service process characteristics objectively and to depict them so that employees, customers and managers alike know what the service is, can see their role in its delivery and understand all of the steps and flows involved in the service process. Another challenge that service organizations face is standardizing the service.
Ø When it comes to standardizations, the question is whether to set standards as expected by the customers or to set it as the company perceives it. Creating service standards that address customer expectations often requires altering the very process by which work is accomplished, which is ingrained in most companies.
Ø The third challenge is in ensuring that each and every employee meets the standards set in each and every step of service delivery. Hence, measurement systems become necessary to understand and correct errors. Tell the students that this module will equip the students with knowledge and skills on developing service systems, customer-defined service standards and measurement systems.
• Understand and Recognising Need for Service Systems.
• Explain the benefits of service blueprints.
• Recognise Quality Function Development as another effective tool for developing Service Systems.
• Illustrate how to translate customer expectations into specific behaviours and actions.
• Identify the various store and non-store retailing outlets.
Q. What do the following situations signify?
a. There is a long queue at booking table at Sethi’s Car Rentals at Indira Gandhi Airport. Customers who had booked their car through phone also needed to wait nearly forty-five minutes to have a car driven to them. When asked, the booking clerk said, ‘Yes we tell customers who call over phone to come and take the car, but we also need to satisfy clients who walked in first.’
b. When a customer drops his car at Cars and Cars for servicing, they make a quick estimate of how much the service and spares would cost for the particular problem and tell the customer so that the customer has an idea of how much to pay when he takes delivery of the car.
c. One of the well known banks offer a special gold Visa Card for customers who hold a minimum of Rs. 15,000 in their accounts over six months. The bank automatically calls customers to find out if they are interested and sends in a representative to take the customer’s signature assuring his interest and mails the card to the customer’s address. The bank mentions in the covering letter that the customer can activate the card by dialing the given phone number.
Service Systems
• Service Systems are essentially the tools that support the service process to happen smoothly.
• They comprise the methods, techniques, steps involved in the service process and the technology, equipment, trained manpower and material that support them.
Derive through the above exercise that in all the situations, emphasis is laid on the customers and thus deriving activities that will support the service process smoothly.
Q. Have you ever come across someone complaining ‘there are no systems in place here’? What do they mean?
Probable responses would be, that they have experienced such a place and by saying that system is not in place, they mean that employees are not conversant or trained to give the desired service, probably the employees are not sure of how to provide good service.
We need to know that - Because services are intangible, such as a hospital stay, a music lesson or a basketball match, they are difficult to describe and communicate.
When services are delivered over a long period, for example a week’s resort vacation, a six-month training on sewing, a ten weeks weight reduction program, their complexity increases and they become even more difficult to define and describe.
Further, because services are heterogeneous, a customer getting a hair cut done at a hair saloon expects a similar service again when she returns for the next hair cut irrespective of whether the employees remain the same.
Need For Service Systems
As services are prone to heterogeneity, Service Systems are essential to:
• Bring about order in service delivery process.
• Actively involve customers in the service consumption process.
• Standardize service delivery and service quality.
Q. Which of the following customer perceptions/expectations can be immediately converted into performance standards that can be standardized and practiced across the organization for a specific service process? Why?
- Satisfaction.
- Relationship.
- Value.
d. Reliability.
- Assurance.
- Responsiveness.
- Empathy.
- Tangibles.
- Price.
- On-time delivery.
- Returning calls quickly.
- Service person’s knowledge of customer/her industry.
- Delivers as promised.
- Return calls in two hours.
- Competition knowledge.
Among the above performance parameters, Standards such as tangibles, price, delivered as promised, return calls in two hours are the parameters that can be easily standardized.
Service Blueprint
A service blueprint is a picture or map that accurately portrays the service system so that the different people involved in providing it can understand and deal with it objectively regardless of their roles or their individual points of view.
Case study
The manufacturing and construction industries have a long tradition of engineering and design. Can you imagine a house being built without detailed specifications? Can you imagine a car, computer or even a simple product such as a child’s toy being produced without concrete and detailed plans, written specifications and engineering drawings?
Yet services commonly lack such specifications. A service even a complex one might be introduced without any formal, objective of the process. This typically means that the service provider has not thought about how to provide the service or even if he knows a method of doing it, he does not have the specifications clearly written down for his employees to follow. This would result in tremendous heterogeneity and hence poor service quality in the customer’s perception.
Blueprints are particularly useful at the design and redesign stages of service development and in training employees to have the whole picture of the service system.
A service blueprint visually displays the service by simultaneously depicting the process of service delivery, the points of customer contacts, the roles of customers and employees and the visible elements of the service i.e., the physical evidence.
Diagram - Service Blueprinting
The process includes breaking down the whole process of service, into various parts and stages; point of customer contact involves the contact points where the customer and the service people meet. For example in a restaurant, the food cooked by the cook is also a service standard but the point of contact will be the table, and the interaction between the waiter and the customer. The third element involves physical elements of services.
Quality Function Deployment
• QFD is a system for translating customer requirements into appropriate company requirements at every stage, from research through production design and development to production, distribution, installation, marketing, sales and services.
Quality function deployment (QFD) has been used in the manufacturing industry as a means to integrate marketing and engineering personnel in the development process. The ideas are also applicable to services; and in the case of services, QFD is implemented via what is known as ‘House of Quality’, which we will discuss in this lesson.
The house of quality links customer requirements to design characteristics of the product or service. These are then linked to internal processes such as product planning, process planning, and production planning and parts deployment. The house of quality is a diagrammatic representation of the service, its attributes, the customers’ requirements and the company’s capabilities.
The house of quality comprises three distinct sections:
· Customer quality criteria (what is perceived by the customer).
· Service company attributes (how these criteria are created by the firm).
· Relationship grid (how the two are related).
Quality Function Deployment
to see clearly click on it.
The different elements of the house of quality are explained as below:
- Customer expectations – customer expectations are attributes that customers perceive as important.
- Importances of expectations – customer expectations are rated on their relative importance on a scale of 1 to 9.
- Service elements – elements of service the company has a control over such as training, capacity, equipment, attitude of employees and information.
- Relationship among elements – the roof of the house represents the relationship between the various controllable elements. For example, the relationship between information and equipment is strong whereas the relationship between information and attitude is weak.
- The body of the house exhibits the association between expectation and service elements. These are numbered 0 to 9 where 0 indicates no effect of the service element to satisfy the customer expectation and 9 indicates a very strong effect.
- The weighted score on the floor of the house represents the total points for each element calculated by multiplying the importance weights with the element association ratings and adding all scores for each element together.
- Difficulty rankings in the basement of the house are the difficulty rankings assigned to each element on how difficult it would be to make improvements in that element.
- Competitive assessment can be brought in by comparing the scores obtained in the house of quality for the service with that of a competitor.
The completed house of quality can be used to design the preliminary service based on the relative importance of the various attributes to customers.
Q. If your company sets broad standards such as ‘improve customer relationship skills’, would it be difficult to interpret, measure and achieve.
Answer: Yes, it would be difficult.
We should also refer to the earlier QBD In, which students had to identify customer perceptions/expectations that can be immediately converted into performance standards.
Derive:
The data that the company collects often captures customer requirements in very abstract terms – they are too broad and general. Effective service standards have to be defined in very specific ways that enable employees to understand what they are being asked to deliver.
For example, American Airlines measures how long it takes to answer a reservations call or process a customer in a ticket line or get a plane full of passengers on board an aircraft or open the door of the airplane once in reaches the destination, or get food aboard or get trash off the flight.
Customer expectations can be mapped on a scale of abstraction to concreteness from most abstract to most concrete.
Translating Customer Expectations
to see clearly click on it.
At the very abstract level are customer requirements that are too general – satisfaction, value, relationships etc. A little less abstract terms that customers may use would be reliability, assurance, responsiveness etc. Tangibles and price may be more concrete along the scale. Further down are attributes that are more specific in describing requirements such as delivery, returning calls, knowledge of the customer etc. If we dig still deeper beneath the attribute level, we get to specific behaviors and actions that are at the right level of specificity for setting standards.
The level of customer requirements appropriate for customer-defined standards is concrete behaviors and actions. These are equivalent to features and functions in products and the most abstract level is equivalent to the product’s general overall benefits.
It is relatively easy to differentiate between features and benefits in the case of products, it is rather more complicated to distinguish between behaviors and actions and attributes or dimensions of service. This difficulty is one of the main reasons for difficulty in applying ‘voice of the customer’ or ‘quality function deployment’ equivalents in the service industry.
Measurements of behaviors and actions in the service industry can be differentiated into ‘hard’ measurements and ‘soft’ measurements.
Hard measurements consist of counts or audits or timed actions that would provide feedback about the operational performance of a service standard. Hard measurement data can be captured continuously and operationally without asking the customer’s opinion about them. For example, some of the hard measurement components could be:
- Missing proofs of delivery – the number of invoices that do not include proof of delivery counterfoil.
- Wrong day deliveries – number of packages delivered after the committed date.
The appropriate hard measure to deliver to customer requirements is always intuitive or obvious and the potential for counting and tracking irrelevant aspect of operations is high. Hence it is always desirable to link the ‘hard’ measure of operational performance with the ‘soft’ measures to be sure if they are strongly correlated.
Soft or perceptual measurements can document customers’ opinions about whether performance met standards; trailer calls and relationship surveys.
Trailer calls are associated with specific service encounters, are short (approximately six or seven questions) and are administered in as close in time to a specific service encounter as possible.
Relationship surveys cover all aspects of the customer’s relationship with the company, are typically expressed in attributes and also usually completed once every year.
The company must decide on a survey strategy with a combination of relationship surveys and trailer calls to obtain soft measurement feedback.
Summary
• Service Systems are essentially the tools that support the service process to happen smoothly. They comprise the methods, techniques, steps involved in the service process and the technology, equipment, trained manpower and material that support them.
• A service blueprint is a picture or map that accurately portrays the service system so that the different people involved in providing it can understand and deal with it objectively regardless of their roles or their individual points of view.
• Quality function deployment is yet another tool for linking customer requirements to internal elements of service design.
• The house of quality is a diagrammatic representation of the service, its attributes, the customers’ requirements and the company’s capabilities.
• Customer expectations can be mapped on a scale of abstraction to concreteness from most abstract to most concrete.
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