Characteristics of Service Marketing

• Service marketers must be concerned about 4 main characteristics of service.

• INTANGIBILITYPhysical products can be seen, felt, touched, tasted, smelled before they

are purchased. Services on the other hand cannot be seen, heard, smelled or tasted. Prior to boarding an airline, airline passengers have nothing but an airline ticket and a promise of safe delivery to their destination.

Members of a hotel sales force cannot take a hotel room with them on a sales call. In fact they do not sell a room; instead they sell the right to use a room for a specific period of time. When hotel guests leave, they have nothing to show for the purchase, but a receipt. The customer may go empty-handed but not empty headed.

Characteristics of Service Marketing

• They have memories that can be shared with others. Marriott vacation club international realises this, and they have made a deliberate effort to create memorable guests experiences. Marriott realises that a white-water rafting trip can create memories a family visiting their mountainside Resort in Utah will talk about for yrs. Families who visit this resort will always want to come back.

• In the hospitality and travel industry, many of the products sold are intangible experiences.

• If we are going to buy a pair of shoes, we can try them on first, but if we are going to eat in a restaurant, we do not know what we will receive until we have experienced the food and service.

• To reduce uncertainty caused by service intangibility, buyers look for tangible evidences that will provide information and confidence about the service.

Characteristics of Service Marketing

• The exterior of a restaurant is the first thing an arriving guest sees. The condition of the ground and the overall cleanliness of the of the restaurant provide clues as to how the restaurant is run.

• The Regent Hotel in Hong Kong makes sure that all its uniform and non uniform employees reinforce the hotel’s image of elegance and professionalism. The appearance of the employees is part of the Regent’s tangible evidence. This hotel also purposely parks luxury cars such as Rolls Royce in front to deliver an instant message of quality and upscale service.

Service marketing

• INSEPARABILITYIn the hospitality industry, both the service provider and the

customer must be present for the transaction to occur. Customer-contact employees are part of the product. The food in the restaurant may be wonderful, but if the service person has a poor attitude customers will rate down the over all restaurant experience. They will not be satisfied with their experience.

Similarly customer are also part of the product. A couple may have chosen a restaurant because it is quiet and romantic but if a group of loud people are in the same room, the couple may be disappointed.

Service Marketing• VARIABILITYServices are highly variable. Their quality depends on who provides

them and when and where they are provided. Services are produced and consumed at the same time, which limits quality control.

A guest can receive excellent service one day and a average / bad service from the same person the next day. Sometimes average services or bad services are provided if the service provider is not well or may have other emotional problems. Lack of communication and too much of guest expectation is another source of variability. A restaurant customer ordering a medium steak may expect it to be cooked all the way through, whereas the person preparing the steak may define medium as having a warm pick centre. The guest will be disappointed when he or she cuts into the steak and sees pink meat.

Service Marketing

• PERISHABILITYServices cannot be stored. A 100-room hotel that sells only 60

rooms on a particular day cannot inventory the 40 unsold rooms and then sell 140 rooms the next day. Revenue lost from not selling those 40 rooms is gone forever. Because of service perishability, some hotels charge guests holding guaranteed reservations even when they fail to check into the hotel. Restaurants are also charging a fee to customers who do not show up for a reservation. They too realise that if someone does not show for a reservation, the opportunity too sell that seat may be lost

MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR SERVICE BUSINESSES

• Service marketers can do many things to increase service effectiveness using the characteristics above.

Internal Marketing – Here, the service firm must train and motivate its customer-contact employees and all the supporting service people to work as a team to provide customer satisfaction. For a co to deliver consistently high service quality, everyone must practice a customer orientation. It is not enough for the marketing dept alone to be customer oriented, everyone else must be customer oriented.

Interactive marketing – this means that perceived quality depends heavily on the quality of buyer-seller interaction during the service encounter. The customer judges service quality not just on the quality of food for example but also judges on the service provided in the restaurant. Service employees will therefore have to master interactive marketing skills or functions as well.

Service Marketing Managing service quality:One of the strategies service firms can use to satisfy customers

and to remain competitive is by delivering consistently higher quality than its competitors. Many service firms have now joined the Total Quality Movement. (TQM) Many companies are finding that outstanding service quality can give a potential competitive advantage that leads to superior sales and profit performance.

The key is to exceed the customer’s service-quality expectations. As the chief executive at American Express puts it “Promise only what you can deliver and deliver more than you promise”.

Tangibilizing the Product

• Service marketers should take steps to provide their prospective customers with evidence that will help tangibilize the service.

• Promotional materials, employees’ appearances and the service firms environment all help to tangibilize service.

• A hotel’s promotional material might include a meeting planner’s packet, containing photograph’s of the hotel’s public area, guest rooms and meeting space. The packet would also contain floor plans of the meeting space, including room capacities for the different types of set ups, to help the meeting planner visualise the meeting space.

Tangibilizing the Product

• A banquet salesperson for a fine restaurant can make the product tangible by taking pastry samples on morning sales calls. This creates goodwill and provides the prospective client with some knowledge about the restaurant's food quality.

• The sales person may also be the prospective customer’s first contact with that business. A sales person who is well groomed and dressed appropriately and who answers in a prompt professional manner can do a great deal to help the customer develop a good image of the hotel.

• Uniforms also provide tangible evidence of the experience.