BBA-5th Semester
Services Marketing
Course Code: MKT 323
Maria N. Shahid
Department of International Business and Marketing,
NUST Business School (NBS),
National University of Sciences & Technology
(NUST)
Islamabad, Pakistan.
▪ Book:
Services Marketing
Ninth Edition
World Scientific, 2022
▪ Authors:
Jochen Wirtz
Christopher Lovelock
▪ Publisher:
World Scientific
Course: Services Marketing (BBA, 5th Semester)
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Chapter 8:
Designing Service Process
❑ What is a Service Process?
❑ Designing & Documenting Services
❑ Developing a Service Blue Print
⁕ Fail-Proofing to Design Fail Points Out of Service Processes
⁕ Service Standards & Targets
⁕ Consumer Perceptions and Emotions in Service Process Design
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What is a Service Process?
▪ From the customer’s perspective, services are experiences.
▪ From the organization’s perspective, services are the processes that
are designed and managed to create the desired experience for
customers.
▪ Processes are the underlying architecture of services.
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(Cont’d)
Processes,
▪ describe the method and sequence in which service
operating systems work
and
▪ specify how they link together to create the value
proposition promised to the customers.
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(Cont’d)
▪ Badly designed processes are likely to annoy customers because they
often result in slow, frustrating, and poor quality service delivery.
▪ Poor processes make it difficult for frontline employees to do their
jobs well, thus resulting in low productivity, and increase the risk of
service failures.
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Designing & Documenting Services
▪ Flowcharting and Blueprinting are two key tools used for
documenting and redesigning existing service processes and for
designing new ones.
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(Cont’d)
Flowcharting is a technique for displaying the nature and sequence of
the different steps in delivering a service to the customer.
➢It is a simple way to visualize the total customer journey and
service experience.
➢By flowcharting the sequence of encounters (also called customer
journey) customers have with a service organization, we can gain
valuable insights into the nature of an existing service.
➢This is especially so if they are used together with personas, that is,
customer profiles that represent particular user segments.
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(Cont’d)
▪ Blueprinting is a more complex form of flowcharting, specifying in
detail how service processes are constructed, including what is visible
to the customer and all that goes on in the back office.
➢Blueprints facilitate the detailed design and redesign of customer
service processes.
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Developing a Service Blueprint
A blueprint typically has the following design elements:
▪ The front-stage activities that map the overall customer experience,
desired inputs and outputs, and sequence in which the delivery of that
output should take place.
▪ The physical evidence of the front-stage activities the customer can
see and use to assess service quality.
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(Cont’d)
▪ The line of visibility clearly separates what customers experience and
can see (the frontstage processes), and what customers can’t see (the
back-stage processes)
▪ The back-stage activities that must be performed to support a
particular front-stage step.
▪ The support processes and supplies where support processes are
typically provided by the information system, and supplies are needed
for both front- and back-stage steps.
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(Cont’d)
▪ Fail points are where there is a risk of things going wrong and
affecting service quality.
▪ Fail points should be designed out of a process (e.g., via the use
of ⃰ poka-yokes), and,
▪ Firms should have backup plans for failures that are not
preventable.
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(Cont’d)
▪ Common customer waits in the process and points of potential
excessive waits. These should then either be designed out of the
process, or if that is not possible, firms can implement strategies to
make waits less unpleasant.
▪ Service standards and targets should be established for each activity,
reflecting customer expectations. This includes specific times to be set
for the completion of each task and the acceptable wait between each
customer activity.
▪ (Figure 8.6)
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(Cont’d)
⃰ Fail-Proofing to Design Fail Points Out of Service Processes
▪ A good blueprint identifies fail points where things can go wrong.
▪ Fail-safe methods, also called poka-yokes, can then be designed to
prevent and/ or recover such failures for both employees and
customers.
▪ The term poka-yoke is derived from the Japanese words poka
(inadvertent errors) and yokeru (to prevent) and is now widely applied
to fail-safe service processes.
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(Cont’d)
▪ It is a TQM method.
▪ This method ensures that service employees do things correctly, as
asked, in the right order, and at the right speed.
▪ A three-step approach can be used to develop poka-yokes:
1. Collect information on the most common fail points.
2. Identify the root causes of those failures.
3. Create strategies to prevent the failures
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(Cont’d)
Service Standards & Targets:
▪ Service blueprints help to set service standards that should be high
enough to satisfy customers.
▪ As standards need to be measurable, important but subjective or
intangible service attributes need to be operationalized.
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(Cont’d)
▪ This can often be achieved through service process indicators that
capture the essence or at least approximate these attributes.
▪ Once standards are decided, performance targets can be set.
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(Cont’d)
Consumer Perceptions and Emotions in Service Process Design:
Service processes need to be designed with emotional intelligence. Key
principles about sequencing service include:
1. Start strong. The opening scenes of a service drama are particularly
important, because customers’ first impressions can affect their
evaluations of quality during later stages of service delivery.
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(Cont’d)
2. Build an improving trend. All things being equal, it is better to start
a little lower and build a little higher than to start a little higher and
fall off a little at the end.
3. Create a peak. Customers tend to remember the peak!
4. Get bad experiences over with earlier on so that negative aspects of
the experience are less likely to dominate the memory of the entire
service encounter.
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(Cont’d)
5. Segment pleasure but combine pain. Service processes should
extend the feeling of pleasurable experiences by dividing them up
throughout the experience and combining unpleasant experiences
into a single event as far as possible.
6. Finish strong. Ending on a high note is an important aspect of every
service encounter even if it is just a cheerful and affirmative “Have a
nice day.”
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(Cont’d)
7. A tool that helps to manage customer emotions is emotionprints,
which documents likely customer emotions at each stage of the
service process. The objective is to manage the customer experience
well.
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