Page 179 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Services Management

Notes

Note Generally, customers are more expressive in services than in goods because they
have direct interaction with the service provider. Relationship marketing contributes a
lot in this direction.

8.1.2 Screening Ideas

A basic minimum criterion shall be developed to check each idea on its suitability to the
organisation. An expert team will be constituted by the firm to screen the ideas. There are
generally two types of errors possible at this stage. They are ‘go’ errors and ‘drop’ errors. If a bad
idea is forwarded for further processing, the efforts would be waste and opportunity cost would
be more. On the other hand, if a good idea is dropped as waste than opportunity cost would be
more. On the other hand, if a good idea is dropped out, perhaps it is lost for the company.
Therefore, careful assessment is necessary in screening the ideas.

8.1.3 Concept Development and Testing

Concept development means translation of an idea into a descriptive form in concrete terms.
The service characteristics such as intangibility and simultaneous production and consumption,
create lot of problems at this state. A clearly defined service concept includes specific features
and characteristics of service, customer employee interactions and the service design document.
The service design document describes the problem addressed by the service, discuss the reasons
for offering new service, itemize the service process and its benefits and provide a rationale for
purchasing the service. Service Blue printing is the technique popularly used for the concept
development of service.
Service Blue Print: A service blueprint is a picture or map that portrays accurately the service
system. The purpose is to provide a clear picture to different people involved in providing
service, who can understand and act accordingly without any confusion or ambiguity. The
blueprint visually depicts the service process, the roles or customers and employees and the line
of visibility. Also it depicts the systematic arrangement of various service points, the means by
which services are performed and also the evidences for service expectations by the customers.
For designing a blueprint, decision theory is most useful. The decision theory provides analytical
approach to describe processes that required Judgment and choices to provide personalised or
customised services.
If we take a bank as an example, the line of interaction where customer actins would be, are
counters opened by the branch office – cash receipts, payments, drafts, clearance, receiving
counters for withdrawal forms, etc. The on stage contact employees above the line of visibility
are the employees assigned the duty of interacting with various customers and also support
employees for processing. The backstage contact employees are not on the line of visibility.
They manage accounting system and other operational systems that support front line personnel.

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Caution Having collected ideas in good number, they shall be screened to find out a
manageable number for further consideration.
They will have interactions only with the employees. The support processes cover internal
services like research, preparation of documents and arrangements for meetings and other
activities. Zeithaml and Bitner have developed eight steps for building a service blueprint.

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