Page 201 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Services Management

Notes 9.2.3 Duration Effects

We all know that an hour is not an hour. How quickly it passes depends on a number of factors
such as whether we are involved in pleasant or unpleasant activities, whether we are paying
attention to the passage of time, how many segments the experience is divided into, etc. A big
question is how do we make positive events seem longer and negative events shorter in
retrospect? There is some evidence that the greater the number of discrete segments that are
perceived to the customer, the longer the process appears. Thus for an amusement park visit,
several shorter rides make the day seem longer and more enjoyable than a few longer rides,
even though the time spent actually riding was the same. In a call center, more steps and options
create the perception of the interaction being longer than it actually is. In general we find that
perceived duration of a wait, or equivalently the level of dissatisfaction with a wait depends on
(i) emotions and moods,
(ii) rate of goal progress and evidence of goal progress,

(iii) degree of perceived control, and
(iv) attention paid to passage of time
Existing techniques for handling the psychology of waiting can be inferred from these four
variables. These variables also suggest other techniques for improving the waiting experience.
For instance, a call back option in call centers affords greater control to the customers.

9.2.4 Shaping Attributions

One such insight is that we are predisposed to accept responsibility for success and reject
responsibility for failure. (Protecting one’s self-esteem is a dominate reason for such attributions.)
For service encounter design, we want to find ways of conveying up front what is the customers’
responsibility without damaging their self-esteem. Another insight is that we overestimate our
ability to cause an outcome that is actually determined by chance. (We engage in counterfactual
thinking—mental simulations—as to what might have been.) Often this is seen as the last step in
an extended process and leads to the practical guideline that servers should avoid communicating
near misses when dealing with a customer in situations when a constellation of factors resulted
in the undesired final outcome.

Did u know? Every service outcome contains the potential for placing blame or claiming
credit. Attribution theory provides insights into how people make these judgments.

9.2.5 Perceived Control

In virtually every service encounter, customers must relinquish some control to the service firm
to get the job done, yet customers like situations where they perceive they have some control.

Research in many service settings has shown there is a relationship between perceptions of
control and satisfaction. For example, studies in health care management have consistently
shown that when patients have reasonable control over their treatment regimens, they are more
satisfied than when doctors are in total control. In simple options such as allowing a patient to
choose which arm from to draw blood from results in less feeling of pain than when ordered to
draw blood from a specific arm. Even in intensive care situations, patients who are allowed to
choose when they received visitors, when they eat and the level of exercise they could undertake,
exhibit lower levels of stress and get well faster. Another form, and often a substitute for actual
control is cognitive control where the customer feels she/he can rely on the system to work

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