
52 Designing Service Excellence
to retain loyal customers. By denition, repeat customers have experienced
the service encounter, have perhaps had opportunities to use alternative
service offerings, and have reached a positive evaluation of the alternative
service providers.
14
Word-of-mouth recommendations to friends tend to be a
powerful incentive to potential customers. Word-of-mouth warnings (caveat
emptor) are a powerful deterrent.
15
The Costs of Poor Service
A useful model and discussion of how poor service impinges on revenues
and costs is contained in Zeithaml et al. (1996).
16
Their model is shown in
Figure4.1.
The gure shows four componen ...