Service Management and Marketing: Managing the Service Profit Logic, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 13CUSTOMER-FOCUSED ORGANIZATION: STRUCTURE, RESOURCES AND SERVICE PROCESSES

“The firm should turn the organizational pyramid upside down – mentally and structurally. Its customers have done so long ago.”

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses how to structure a service organization and manage service processes such that the service provider becomes customer-focused. The first half of the chapter concentrates on structural issues, such as the use of marketing departments or other organizational solutions, so that a total marketing process can best be facilitated. The rest of the chapter discusses how to plan and manage the service (production) process so that the interactive marketing process of a service provider is successful. A service system model and an extended servicescape model are presented. After having read the chapter the reader should understand the problems involved with organizing marketing in a traditional way in service contexts and how to find new service-oriented solutions, and know how to develop the service process so that a good marketing impact is achieved.

THE MARKETING PROCESS AND THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT

In conventional marketing thinking, which is based mainly on experience from consumer packaged goods, a marketing department is the organizational unit responsible for planning and implementing marketing activities. The logic behind this solution is, of course, that marketing can best be planned and implemented if all marketing activities are concentrated ...