The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business

SERVICE QUALITY

Application: Part of Marketing Mix, Strategic Defence, Proactive Relationship Building, Part of a Service Offer

The Concept

The concepts and policies of service quality have several different generic names: “customer care”, “after care”, “the after market”, “service recovery”, and “customer experience management”. All capture the fact that the experience of a product or service can contribute to how well or badly a business does in its market. It is a marketing issue because it affects the growth of the firm. A poor experience will undermine any marketing, no matter how good, because negative word-of-mouth will work against any marketing claims.

There are a number of quality issues that need to be understood and acted upon, including the type of after care being offered and how it resonates with customers, the determinants of customer expectations, and all the different aspects that make up the firm’s relationships with them. This is not a vague or imprecise after thought, nor is it an unrefined, passionate desire to give buyers everything they want. As in every other area of marketing, the design of strategies and processes which produce an appropriate service experience and excellent after care is essentially very practical. This is as much about setting policy and installing processes as any other aspect of sensible marketing.

Customer care and service quality ...