Overview of chapter 6
Customer service is an important point of focus for organisations everywhere today. In paying attention to their customers, and developing long-term relationships with them, organisations have brought their customers practically into the workplace. Customer satisfaction is increasingly being seen as a measure of success for the organisation because it is recognised that repeat business is much more cost effective than attracting new customers. This focus on the customer has given rise to a range of information sources, including courses at universities, that teach the management of the relationship between organisations and their customers.
Customer service is much more than receiving complaints from customers in a friendly manner. The use of IT to record customer complaints or comments has been taken up widely by many companies around the world. This may be good for what it does but IT is not a suitable medium for building long-term relationships. The personal contact that can be provided by people talking to each other cannot be replaced by an electronic transactional method of exchanging information. On the other hand, in some industries, for instance banks, the use of IT actually makes the transaction very customer friendly if long waits in queues are eliminated and convenience enhanced.
As countries develop, their economy generally shifts from being manufacturing based to service based. In that environment, customer service takes on greater importance in the success and market standing of any organisation, regardless of whether they provide direct services or business-to-business services. At the same time, all of us experience service in various transactions in our lives every day - office colleagues, shopping, dealing with government offices and banks, and so forth. Increasingly, in the media, one comes across cases of poor service encounters, which are important in themselves, in the environment of a service industry. More important, however, is that they are being recognised as important enough to be reported and highlighted in the community.
Topics
The topics to be studied in this chapter are:
- 6.1 Link between quality and customer service
- 6.2 Defining customer service quality
- 6.3 Customer service quality failures
- 6.4 Improving customer service quality
Pros and cons: SERVQUAL in practice
Learning outcomes
When you have completed this chapter, you should be able to:
- understand the relationship between quality and customer service;
- describe how customer service standards are defined and measures for improvement are put in place;
- describe how the service quality measurement instrument, SERVQUAL, is used.
