Confirming Pages
Chapter 10
Strategy Insight
Customer-Defined Service Standards
287
When Is the Strategy of Customization
Better than Standardization?
This chapter focuses on the benefits of customerdefined standards in the context of situations—
hotels, retail stores, service outlets—in which it is
important to provide the same service to all or most
customers. In these situations, standards establish
strong guidelines for technology and employees to
ensure consistency and reliability. In other services,
providing standardization is neither appropriate
nor possible, and customization—providing unique
types and levels of service to customers—is a deliberate strategy.
In most “expert” services—such as accounting, consulting, engineering, and dentistry, for
example—professionals provide customized and
individualized services; standardization of the tasks
is often perceived as being impersonal, inadequate,
and not in the customer’s best interests. Because
patient and client needs differ, these professionals
offer very customized services that address individual requirements. They must adapt their offerings to
the particular needs of each customer because each
situation is different. Even within a given medical
specialty, few patients have the same illness with precisely the same symptoms and the same medical history. Therefore, standardizing the amount of time a
doctor spends with a patient is rarely possible—one
of the reasons patients usually must wait before
receiving medical services even though they have
advance appointments. Because professionals such
as accountants and lawyers cannot usually standardize what they provide, they often charge by the
hour rather than by the job, which allows them to
be compensated for the customized periods of time
they spend with clients. It is important to recognize,
however, that even in highly customized services,
some aspects of service provision can be routinized. Physicians and dentists, for example, can and
do standardize recurring and nontechnical aspects
such as checking patients in, weighing patients, taking routine measurements, billing patients, and collecting payment. In delegating these routine tasks
to assistants, physicians and dentists can spend more
of their time on using their expertise in diagnosis or
patient care.
Another situation in which customization is the
chosen strategy is in business-to-business contexts,
particularly with key accounts. When accounts are
large and critical to a provider, most aspects of
service provision are customized. At a very basic
level, this customization takes the form of service
contracts—sometimes referred to as service-level
agreements—in which the client and the provider
agree on issues such as response time when clients
have equipment failures or delivery time and fulfillment when retail clients depend on items being in
stock in their stores. At a higher level, customization
involves creative problem solving and innovative
ideas (as in consulting services).
Finally, many consumer services are designed
to be (or appear) very customized. These services
include spa and upscale hotel visits, rafting trips,
exotic vacations such as safaris, and even haircuts
from expensive salons. In these situations, the steps
taken to ensure the successful delivery of service are
often standardized behind the scenes but appear
to the customer to be very individualized. Even Disney theme parks use this approach, employing hundreds of standards to ensure the delivery of “magic”
to customers in a seemingly unique way across the
many service encounters.
telephone support systems that do not allow consumers to speak to humans. Because
these systems save companies money (and actually provide faster service to some
customers), many organizations have switched from the labor-intensive practice of
having customer representatives to these “automated” systems. To close gap 2, standards set by companies must be based on customer requirements and expectations
rather than just on internal company goals. In this chapter we make the case that
company-defined standards are not typically successful in driving behaviors that
close provider gap 2. Instead, a company must set customer-defined standards: operational standards based on pivotal customer requirements visible to and measured
Marketing dei servizi 3/ed
Valarie A. Zeithaml, Mary Jo Bitner, Dwayne D. Gremler, Enrico Bonetti
© 2012, The McGraw-Hill Companies srl
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