Marketing has come from the Mass Production and into a Mass Customization field, in which market used to be promoted by supply-push, and now, by demand-pull, while in competitions product quality goes balanced with each other but services in corporations and firms weight more increasingly, showing that the service factors relevant to customers decides marketing direction, marketing process and even sometimes marketing strategy. Failure to satisfy customers, especially on their service perception not only means a loss of contemporary market but also future space.
So far we can say what kind of service should be and how the kind of service goes influence development of most firms. More important as services are relational to almost each sector in business, managing from a service perspective benefits including relational approaches and customer management. Many cases witness the goodness of relationship from services form a strong base of long-term and successful development between firms and customers, but on the other hand, it’s true that customers do not always want to participate in some relations with firms.Nevertheless, relationship from services is always there for a further progress whenever both sides consider it appropriate.
Meanwhile, demand diversification leads to division of labor on specification, which means, in service business, service diversified with personal needs is a main stream so that service contents split into small professions but the whole business goes larger. Factors and Performance Model in Customer Service Usually a service is doing action for someone or something.More often, it’s intangible, while a product is tangible for we can touch it or own it indeed. But a service is an experience process at the point where purchasing and consuming happens simultaneously so that the service perishes quickly. A man may go to a cafe and have an enjoyable experience, but next day when he returns for another pleasure, the situation, say, experience might go another way.Hence in service marketing there are five central factors influencing much marketing strategy, including: intangibility, inseparability, variability, perishability and right of ownership[1].
Western economies have witnessed deterioration of their conventional manufacturing industries, and a big growth in the service economies, which naturally widen and extend marketing into a new field where we see 7P’s, three new important factors – people, physical evidence and process.The New 3P’s in Service Marketing Traditional 4P’s marketing is adapt to products marketing, but in service management something 9 new are needed. Booms and Bitner advise three new P’s to service marketing: people, physical evidence and process [2]. People People are the most important elements in any service or experience.
Since inseparability and variability lead to a customer experience, which, we say, one of the aspects of expected performance, are often altered to meet the individual needs of person consuming it.Then we can imagine the situation that people always buy from people that they like, so that the skills, attitude, appearance of staff go up to the top class. There are several ways in which people add value to an experience: first is training, personnel developed or educated to obtain a high quality of personal service; second is personal selling, a tough work and creative skill; and third is customer service, a team who provide expertise, technical support and some customer interface.Physical Evidence The intangibility of service brings the difficulties of unclear, untouchable, and even doubtful sometimes.
Strictly speaking there are no physical attributes in service, so a consumer often relies on those tangible evidences for confidence. Here we consider football match, which is typically packed full of physical evidence. A ticket often has the logo of home team, and plays in a same team are wearing uniforms. The stadium is impressive and has an electrifying atmosphere. Audience can have a comfortable seat and be close to store.
All that an audience needs to do is to enjoy the game and to shout encouragement [3]. Process There are several kinds of perceptions within business and literature about process. Some see process as a means to achieve a goal, for example, a 15% rise of stock share price. Some others argue that there are processes integrated to create an overall marketing, like telemarketing and internet marketing can be integrated. A further view is that process is to control marketing, such as measuring achievement objectives.All these views are not particularly customer focused.
In service business, process is an element that appreciates customer experiencing as an organizational offering. It’s viewed as something that customer participates in at different point. Again we can see the importance of interaction with customers. It requires a proper encounter, a proper communication, a proper action and a proper resolution, in which process has a progression of inputs, throughputs and outputs, where service marketing value is added.
