Page 283 - DMGT510_SERVICES_MARKETING

Services Marketing

Notes In any case, it is important to have your staff set clear expectations for customers as to how
long their wait will be and then deliver on those expectations. Customers hate not knowing
how long they will have to wait and being told one wait time and then another. They may
leave feeling your staff either don’t know what they are doing or are deliberately
misleading them. Either possibility is very dangerous to your salon’s reputation.
The service you offer to customers includes every interaction, from the setting of the
appointment to all of the time the customer spends at your salon, including the wait. Your
plan for the waiting experience will influence your operations plan and financial
assumptions and should not be neglected as part of your salon’s business plan.
Source: ezinearticles.com

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
13. The number of customers in waiting line often affects the quality of service delivery.

14. As a service provider, you should try to engage customers who are in queue in other
things like television or magazines.
15. A service provider should never tell the customers why the waiting time is longer than
normal.
16. A service provider should inform the customers about the time when the waiting time is
usually less.

14.5 Summary

A service firm has to take business decisions at three levels: corporate level, business unit

level and functional level. Firm’s decision on the marketing strategy is based on BCG
Model, GE matrix Model, Porter’s Model and Ansoff’s Grid.
A service firm uses BCG Matrix to categorize its SBUs or its products as Stars, Cash Cows,

Problem Children (or Question Marks) and Cash Crunch (or Dogs). The parameters of
classification are market share relative to its competitors and the growth rate of the
industry of the respective SBUs.
GE model is also used for allocating limited resources amongst a service firm’s SBUs or

service products, and then developing marketing and corporate level strategies for them.
For strategies at the SBU level, Michael Porter urges service firms to first assess scope of

target market and differential advantage(s) and then choose the appropriate strategies.
The basis of the Ansoff Grid is that growth becomes an objective for the service firms as it

will garner revenues, make it competitive and strong - and get profits. Growth can be
achieved only with greater understanding of the service firm’s markets and its offers - and
deliberately and methodically utilizing them as growth drivers.
Strategy for a marketer would imply a plan of action that is the prerogative of top marketing

management, is usually long term and comprehensive in concept, and affects the whole
organization and the firm’s whole market.

Service recovery is a process that identifies service failures, effectively resolves customer

problems, classifies their root cause, and yields data that can be integrated with other
measures of performance to assess and improve the service system.

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