Employees' Roles in Service
I.
Service Culture
● The behaviour of the employees in the organisation influences the
culture or pervasive norms (of that organisation) and values that
shape individual and group behaviour.
● Corporate culture is the pattern of shared values and beliefs that give
the members of an organisation meaning, and provide them with the rules
for behaviour in the organisation.
● Culture has been defined more informally as “the way we do things
around here.”
● Ex: church,school,...
● You can know culture by talking/pbsering people.
● Service culture: a culture where an appreciation for good service exists,
and where giving goodservice to internal as well as ultimate, external
customers is considered a natural way of life and one of the most
important norms by everyone.
● Behaviour is influenced by the underlying values, norms, and culture of
the organisation
● Customer oriented and service orientated organisations will have a heart
of service culture.
● Service culture exists when there is:
1. Appreciation for good service = people know that good service is
appreciated and valued
2. Good service is given to internal and external customers = all people
in the organisation deserve the same kind of service
3. Service culture good service "A Way of Life'' and comes naturally
because it is a norm of the organisation.
Service culture is critical to the creation of a customer-focused
organisation and has been identified as a source of competitive
advantage in companie
II. Exhibiting Service Leadership
● Strong service culture begins with leaders who demonstrate a passion for
service excellence. In strong firms, leaders have similar values, ie.
integrity, joy, respects and they "infuse these values into the organisation"
● Employees are more likely to embrace a service culture when they see
management living out these values
● Espoused values—what managers say the values are—tend to have
less impact on employees than enacted values—what employees believe
the values to be because of what they observe management actually
doing
● Culture is driven by what employees perceive that management really
believes, believes, and employees gain an understanding of what is
important in the organisation through the daily experiences they have with
those people in key roles throughout the organisation
III. Developing a Service Culture
● Service culture is not developed overnight. Many little factor are required
to build and sustain a service culture.
● Sustaining service culture takes a lot of consistent effort
IV.
Transporting a Service Culture
● Transporting a service culture through international business
expansion is also very challenging.
1. Organisations service culture may clash with national culture
2. Clash may be with actual values or how they are enacted
3. It is possible that they firm isn't successful in that setting or they
firm needs to be modified for the new setting
● Although tremendous opportunities exist in the global marketplace,
the many legal, cultural,and language barriers become
particularly evident for services that depend on human interaction
V.
The Critical Role of Service Employees
● People—frontline employees and those supporting them from behind the
scenes—are critical to the success of any service organisation.
● The people element of Marketing Mix is important. People are all the
human actors who play a part in service delivery and thus influence
thebuyer’s perceptions: namely, the firm’s personnel, the customer, and
other customers in the service environment.
● The key focus in this chapter is on customer-contact service employees
because:
1. They are the service.
2. They are the organisation in the customer’s eyes.
3. They are the brand.
● In many services, such as hairstyling, the offering is the employee. Or the
employee will personify the firm in the customer's eyes
Service employees are the brand.
● The brand image is not just built and maintained by the products sold and
the advertisement: it is a function of the people who work for them.
Branded Customer Service - Strategies that recognize the power of
employees to create the brand have been referred to as
Contact employees perform the role of marketers because contact
employees represent the organisation and can directly influence customer
satisfaction
VI. The Service Triangle
● The service triangle visually reinforces the importance of people in the
ability of firms to keep their promises and succeed in building customer
relationships
● There are three interlinked groups that work to develop, promote, and
deliver services:
1. The company
2. The customer's
3. The providers - employee, subcontractors, or outside entities who
deliver the company's services
● Between these three points on the triangle, three types of marketing must
be successfully carried out for a service to succeed:
1. External marketing
2. Interactive marketing
3. Internal marketing
External Marketing efforts that the firm engages in to develop its customers’
expectations and make promises to customers regarding what is to be
delivered. Anyone or anything that communicates to the customer before
service delivery can be viewed as part of this external marketing function.
Interactive marketing or real-time marketing. Here is where promises are
kept or broken by the firm’s employees, subcontractors, or agents.
Internal marketing - Management engages in these activities to help the
providers deliver on the service promise: recruiting, training, motivating,
rewarding, and providing equipment and technology. Unless service employees
are able and willing to deliver on the promises made, the firm will not be
successful.
VII. Employee Satisfaction, Customer Satisfaction, and Profit
Satisfied employees make for satisfied customers (and satisfied
customers can, in turn, reinforce employees' sense of satisfaction in their
jobs).
● A climate for service and a climate for employee wellbeing are correlated
with perceptions of service quality.
● Both service climate and human resource management experiences that
employees have within their organisations are reflected in how customers
experience the service.
● The connect between employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction and
loyalty is shown in the service profit chain
● The service profit chain suggests that there are critical linkages among
internal service quality,employee satisfaction/ productivity, the value of
services provided to the customer, and ultimately customer satisfaction,
retention, and profits.
● This does NOT suggest causality; one does not cause the other.
● Companies that exhibit high levels of success on the elements of the
model will be more successful and profitable than those that do not.
VIII. The Effect of Employee Behaviours on Service Quality Dimensions
Reliability | Delivering the service as promised—reliability—is often totally
within the control of frontline employees. When services fail or errors are made,
employees are essential for setting things right and using their judgement to
determine the best course of action for service recovery.
Responsiveness | Frontline employees directly influence customer
perceptions of responsiveness through their personal willingness to help and
their promptness in serving customers
Assurance I the dimension of service quality is highly dependent on
employees’ ability to communicate their credibility and to inspire the customer’s
trust and confidence in the firm. The reputation of the organisation will help, but
in the end, individual employees with whom the customer interacts confirm and
build trust in the organisation or detract from its reputation and ultimately
destroy trust.
Empathy | that employees will pay attention, listen, adapt, and be flexible in
delivering the individual customer's need
IX. Boundary-Spanning Roles
● Frontline service employees are referred to as boundary spanners
because they operate at the organisation's boundary.
● Boundary spanners provide a link between the external customer and
environment and the internal operations of the organisation. They serve
a critical function in understanding, filtering,and interpreting information
and resources to and from the organisation and its external
constituencies.
● No matter the pay, boundary spanning is often a high stress job.
● These stresses and trade-offs can result in failure to deliver services as
specified, which widens the service performance gap
X. Emotional Labour
Emotional Labour is the labour that goes beyond the physical or mental skills
needed to deliver quality service.
In general, boundary-spanning service employees are expected to align their
displayed emotions with organizationally desired emotions via their use of
emotional labour. This includes:
- Smiling
- Eye contact
- Showing sincere interest
- Engaging in friendly conversation with people
XI. Sources of Conflict
● Frontline employees often face interpersonal and interorganizational
conflicts on the job. Their frustration and confusion can, if left unattended,
lead to stress, job dissatisfaction, diminished ability to serve customers,
and burnout.
● Frontline employees inevitably have to deal with conflicts, including
person/role conflicts,organisation/client conflicts, and inter-client
conflicts, as discussed in the next sections
1. Person/Role Conflict
Sometimes there is conflict between what you are asked to do and
personal morals and values.
● Arises in different cultures
● Arises in wearing specific clothing or appearance requirements
2. Organization/Client Conflict
● Most common conflict is between the organisation and the
customers.
● The conflict is greatest when the employee believes the
organisation is wrong in its policies and must decide whether to
accommodate the client and risk losing a job or to follow the
policies. Even greater for employees who rely on tip or commission
3. Organization/Client Conflict
● Most common conflict is between the organisation and the customers.
● The conflict is greatest when the employee believes the organisation is
wrong in its policies and must decide whether to accommodate the client
and risk losing a job or to follow the policies. Even greater for employees
who rely on tip or commission
4. Inter-client Conflict
● Sometimes conflict occurs for boundary spanners when
incompatible expectations and requirements arise from two or
more customers.
● Occurs most often when the service provider is serving customers
in turn or is serving many customers at once
● When serving customers in turn, the provider may satisfy one
customer by spending additional time, customising the service, and
being very flexible in meeting the customer’s needs.Meanwhile,
waiting customers may become dissatisfied because their needs
are not being met in a timely way. Beyond the timing issue, different
clients may prefer different modes of service delivery; one client
may prefer personal recognition and a degree of familiarity while
another client may be “all business” and prefer little interpersonal
interaction.
● When serving many customers at the same time, employees
often find it difficult or impossible to serve the full range of needs of
a group of heterogeneous customers. This type of conflict is readily
apparent in any college classroom in which the instructor must
meet a multitude of student expectations and different preferences
for formats and style. It is also apparent in an entertainment venue
or any type of group training service
XII.
Quality/Productivity Trade-Offs
● Frontline service workers are expected to be effective and efficient:
Expected to deliver satisfying service to customers and at the same
time to be cost-effective and productive in what they do.
● These essential tradeoffs between quality and quantity and
between maximum effectiveness and efficiency place real-time
demands and pressures on service employees.
❖ Technology is being used to an even greater degrees to free
them to provide higher-quality service for the customer
XIII. Strategies for Delivering Service Quality Through People
● Strategies are needed to ensure service employees are willing and able
to deliver quality services and stay motivated to perform in customeroriented, service-minded ways.
● These strategies are referred to as internal marketing people.
● The strategies presented here are organised around four basic themes.
To build a customer-oriented, service-minded workforce, an organisation
must (1) hire the right people,(2) develop people to deliver service
quality, (3) provide the needed support systems, and (4)retain the
best people
XIV. Hire the Right People
The most important recruiting criteria are typically technical training,
certifications, and expertise. However, successful service organisations
generally look beyond the technical qualifications of applicants to assess their
customer and service orientation as well. Figure 11.4 shows a number of ways
to go about hiring the right people
1. Compete for the Best People
● To get the best people, an organisation needs to identify them and
compete with other organisations to hire them.
● Firms should act as marketers in their pursuit of the best employees
● Firms that think of recruiting as a marketing activity will address issues of
market (employee)segmentation, product (job) design, and promotion of
job availability in ways that attract potential long-term employees
2. Hire for Service Competencies and Service Inclination
● Once potential employees have been identified, organisations need to be
conscientious interviewing and screening to identify the best people from
the pool of candidates. Service employees need two complementary
capacities: service competencies and service inclination.
Service Competencies are the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.
● In many cases, employees demonstrate competencies by achieving
particular degrees and certifications, such as obtaining a doctor of
law (JD) degree and passing the relevant state bar examination for
lawyers. ● In other cases, service competencies may not be degree-related but
may instead relate to basic intelligence or physical requirements.
● Given the multidimensional nature of service quality, service employees
should also be screened for service inclination
● Service Inclination—their interest in doing service-related work—which
is reflected in their attitudes toward service and orientation toward serving
customers and fellow employees. Some employees have greater service
inclination than others.
● Research has shown that service effectiveness is correlated with serviceoriented personality characteristics such as helpfulness, thoughtfulness,
and sociability and that the best service companies put a greater
emphasis on hiring those with positive attitudes rather than a specific skill
set
3. Be the Preferred Employer
To this by:
Including extensive training, career and advancement opportunities, excellent
internal support, attractive incentives, and quality goods and services with which
employees are proud to be associated.
XV. Develop People to Deliver Service Quality
To grow and maintain a workforce that is customer oriented and focused on
delivering quality,an organisation must develop its employees to deliver service
quality. That is, once it has hired the right employees, the organisation must
train and work with these individuals to ensure service performance\
1. Train for Technical and Interactive Skills
● To provide quality service, employees need ongoing training in the
necessary technical and interactive skills.
● Examples of technical skills are working with accounting systems
in hotels, cash machine procedures in a retail store, underwriting
procedures in an insurance company, and any operational rules
the company has for running its business. Service employees also
need training in interactive skills that allow them to provide
courteous,caring, responsive, and empathetic service
2. Empower Employees
● Many organisations have discovered that, to be truly responsive to
customer needs, frontline providers need to be empowered to
accommodate customer requests and to recover on the spot when
things go wrong
● Empowerment means giving employees the authority, skills, tools,
and desire to determine how to best serve the customer.
Employees need the knowledge and tools to be able to make these
decisions, and they need incentives that encourage them to make
the right ones.
● The benefits of empowering frontline service workers include a
reduction in job-related stress,improved job satisfaction, greater
adaptability, more creative ideas, and better outcomes for
customers
3. Promote Teamwork
● The nature of many service jobs suggests that customer
satisfaction will be enhanced when employees work as teams.
Employees who feel supported and feel that they have a team
backing them up will be better able to maintain their enthusiasm
and provide quality service.
● One way to promote teamwork is to encourage the attitude that
“everyone has a customer.” That is, even when employees are not
directly responsible for or do not directly interact with the final
customer, they need to know whom they serve directly and how
the role they play in the total service picture is essential to the final
delivery of quality service
● By promoting teamwork, an organisation can enhance the
employees’ abilities to deliver excellent service, while the
camaraderie and support enhance their inclination to be excellent
service providers
XVI. Provide Needed Support Systems
To be efficient and effective in their jobs, service workers require internal
support systems that are aligned with their need to be customer focused. The
following sections suggest strategies for ensuring customer-oriented internal
support.
1. Measure Internal Service Quality
● Measure Internal Service Quality One way to encourage supportive
internal service relationships is to measure and reward internal
service.
● One risk of measuring and focusing on internal service quality and
internal customers is that employees can sometimes get so
wrapped up in meeting the needs of internal customers that they
forget they are in business to serve the ultimate, external
customers.
2. Provide Supportive Technology and Equipment
● To do their jobs effectively and efficiently, service employees need
the right equipment and technology.
3. Develop Service-Oriented Internal Processes
● An organisation’s internal processes should be designed with
customer value and customer satisfaction in mind.
● An organisation’s internal processes should be designed with
customer value and customer satisfaction in mind.\
XVII. Retain the Best People
● An organisation that hires the right people, trains and develops them to
deliver service quality,and provides the needed support must also work
to retain them.
● Employee Turnover can be very detrimental to customer satisfaction,
employee morale, and overall service quality.
● Include:
1. Employees in the Company's vision
2. Treat Employees as Customers
3. Measure and Reward Strong Service Performers
XVIII. Customer-Oriented Service Delivery
● Specific approaches for hiring and energising frontline workers take on a
different look and feel across companies, based on the organisation’s
values, culture, history, and vision.
● This approach places management at the top of the structure and
(implicitly) the customer at the bottom, with customer-contact employees
just above them. If the organisation’s most important people are
customers, they should be at the top of the chart, followed by those with
whom they have contact