Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customer's need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery. For example, Florida Power & Light has developed a sophisticated, computer-based lightening tracking system to anticipate where weather-related service interruptions might occur and strategically position crews at these locations to quicken recovery response time. Offering a service that customers expect to be available at all times and that they will miss only when the lights go out, FPL focuses its energies on matching customer perceptions with potential need. Deluxe Corporation, America's highly successful check printer, regularly exceeds its customers' expectations by shipping nearly 95% of all orders by the day after the orders were received. Deluxe even put U.S. Postal Service stations inside its plants to speed up delivery time. Customer expectations change over time. To anticipate these changes, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company regularly monitors the expectations and perceptions of their customers, using focus group interviews and the authors' 22-item generic SERVQUAL questionnaire, which is customized by adding questions covering specific aspects of service they wish to track. The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service -- reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles -- goes right to the heart of the tendency to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceived quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.
European economies are now dominated by services, and virtually all companies view service as critical to retaining their customers today and in the future. In its third European edition, Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus across the Firm provides full coverage of the foundations of services marketing, placing the distinctive gaps model at the center of this approach. Drawing on the most recent research and using up-to-date and topical examples, the book focuses on the development of customer relationships through quality service, out lining the core concepts and theories in services marketing today. New and updated material in this new edition include: · - New content on the role of digital marketing and social media has been added throughout to reflect the latest developments in this dynamic field · - Increased coverage of Service dominant logic regarding the creation of value and the understanding of customer relationships · - New examples and case studies added from global and innovative companies including AirBnB, IKEA, Disneyland, Scandinavia Airlines, and Skyscanner
Successful businesses recognize that the development of strong customer relationships through quality service (and services) as well as implementing service strategies for competitive advantage are key to their success. In its fourth European edition, Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus across the Firm provides full coverage of the foundations of services marketing, placing the distinctive Gaps model at the center of this approach. The new edition draws on the most recent research, and using up-todate and topical examples, the book focuses on the development of customer relationships through service, outlining the core concepts and theories in services marketing today. New and updated material in this new edition includes: • New content related to human resource strategies, including coverage of the role of robots and chatbots for delivering customer-focused services. • New coverage on listening to customers through research, big data, netnography and monitoring user-generated content. • Increased technology, social media and digital coverage throughout the text, including the delivery of services using mobile and digital platforms, as well as through the Internet of Things. • Brand new examples and case studies added from global and innovative companies including Turkish Airlines, Volvo, EasyJet and McDonalds. Available with McGraw-Hill’s Connect®, the well-established online learning platform, which features our award-winning adaptive reading experience as well as resources to help faculty and institutions improve student outcomes and course delivery efficiency.
Zeithaml's Services Marketing introduces readers to the vital role that services play in the economy and its future. Services dominate the advanced economies of the world, and virtually all companies view services as critical to retaining their customers. The seventh edition maintains a managerial focus by incorporating company examples and strategies for addressing issues in every chapter, emphasizing the knowledge needed to implement service strategies for competitive advantage across industries. New research references and examples in every chapter include increased coverage of new business model examples such as Airbnb, Uber, OpenTable, Mint/Intuit, and others, alongside greater emphasis on technology, digital and social marketing, Big Data, and data analytics as a service. View Table of Contents and Features below for more information.
Designed for executives of companies that manufacture or sell products and students in an MBA program, this book outlines the challenges of launching a service and solutions business within a product-oriented organization. You might view services and solutions as a means to financial growth, reduced revenue volatility, greater differentiation from the competition, increased share of customer budget, and improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and lock-in; but the authors visualize the transition from products sold to services rendered and identify the challenges that leaders will face during the transformation. Inside, the authors provide a framework—the service infusion continuum—to describe the different types of services and solutions that a product-rich company can offer beyond warranties, call centers, and websites that support customers in their use of products.
In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base. The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity. In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.
Services Marketing, 5/e, recognizes that services present special challenges that must be identified and addressed in real circumstances. The heart of the book’s content is to develop strong customer relationships through quality service. The book also focuses on knowledge needed to implement service strategies for competitive advantage across industries. Hence, frameworks for customer-focused management, and strategies for increasing customer satisfaction and retention through service are included in the fifth edition.
The Canadian economy, like all other advanced economies around the world, is dominated by services. Within these economies, companies increasingly view services as critical to present and future success. Of pivotal importance to current and future managers of these companies is having the tools and knowledge they need. Services Marketing is for students and businesspeople who recognize the vital role services play in our economy and who also recognize the unique challenges that services marketing creates. At the heart of the text is the development of strong customer relationships through quality service. This manifests itself in a unique framework called 'the gaps model for service quality', which was developed by the text's lead author, Valarie Zeithaml. The framework shows that closing the gap between customer expectations and customer perceptions is critical to the delivery of superior service and identifies four key provider gaps that must be closed in order to achieve success in services. In addition, the first Canadian edition of Services Marketing contains relevant examples of Canada's service industry, both integrated into the text itself and in the accompanying videos.
This book focuses on the development of customer relationships throught quality service. It puts the customer's experience of services at the centre of its approach.
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