MMELEC4 – ELECTIVE 4 (SERVICE MARKETING)

MODULE 4
Service Quality: Definition, 5 Dimensions and Implementation
Measuring and improving service quality can increase your organization's profits and reputation.
Regardless of the industry, service quality can have a direct impact on your company's ability to
satisfy customer needs while remaining competitive. Learning how to measure and improve
service quality is a valuable skill, but it requires research and expertise.In this article, we discuss
what service quality is, why it's important and how you can ensure a consistent level of service
quality.
What is service quality?
Service quality is a measure of how an organization delivers its services compared to the
expectations of its customers. Customers purchase services as a response to specific needs.
They either consciously or unconsciously have certain standards and expectations for how a
company's delivery of services fulfills those needs. A company with high service quality offers
services that match or exceed its customers' expectations.
5 dimensions of service quality
1. Reliability
This refers to an organization's ability and consistency in performing a certain service in a way
that satisfies its customers' needs. This process involves every step of customer interaction,
including the delivery or execution of the good or service, swift and precise problem resolution
and competitive pricing. Customers have a certain expectation of reliability in buying a specific
product, and a company's success usually depends on its ability to meet those
expectations.Related: 17 Important Customer Service Skills (With Examples)

2. Tangibility
This is an organization's ability to portray service quality to its customers. There are many
factors that give a company highly tangible quality, such as the appearance of its headquarters,
its employees' attire and demeanor, its marketing materials and its customer service
department.

3. Empathy
Empathy is how an organization delivers its services in a way that makes the company seem
empathetic to its customers' desires and demands. A customer who believes a company truly
cares about their well-being is likely to be more loyal to that company.Related: 11 Ways to
Deliver Excellent Customer Service

4. Responsiveness
This is a company's dedication and ability to provide customers with prompt services.
Responsiveness implies receiving, assessing and swiftly replying to customer requests,
feedback, questions and issues. A company with high service quality always responds to
customer communication as soon as possible which can often indicate the value a company
places on customer satisfaction.

5. Assurance
Assurance is the confidence and trust that customers have in a certain organization. This is
especially important with services that a customer might perceive as being above their ability to
understand and properly evaluate, meaning that there has to be a certain element of trust in the
servicing organization's ability to deliver. Company employees need to be mindful of earning the
trust of their customers if they want to retain them.Related: What Is Quality in a Business?
Why is high service quality important?
The main reasons why high service quality is important to an organization are:
 It boosts sales. Customers that perceive a company's services as being high quality are
more likely to do business with that company. Also, customers who buy from companies
with high service quality are more likely to continue buying from those companies
regularly.

 It saves marketing money. Retaining existing customers by offering them high-quality

services is typically less expensive than attracting new ones.

 It can attract quality employees. Highly performing professionals generally prefer to

work for companies with high service quality.

 It can lead to repeat business. Customers who see their issues and complaints swiftly
and efficiently resolved by a company's customer service department may be more likely
to buy from that company again in the future.

 It strengthens the company's brand. The reputation of a company with above-average

service quality can boost sales by attracting new customers or retaining existing ones.

 It eliminates certain barriers to buying. High service quality can convince a hesitant
customer to make a purchase, as they know that if the service is not right for them, they
can rely on strong customer service to remedy the situation.

How to ensure good service quality

The methods of ensuring high service quality usually differ slightly depending on the nature of
the business, customer standards and other factors. However, there are some common
elements. These steps can help you provide strong service quality to your customers:
Understand what your customers want
Customers don't always have very exact needs, making it the company's responsibility to guide
them and help them find the best solution for their particular situation.
Treat your customers respectfully in any situation
Even when customer requests seem unreasonable, companies should treat them with the
utmost respect and make the customer feel like the company is empathetic to their
issue.Related: How To Deal with Angry Customers (With Examples and Tips)

Quickly and correctly respond to customer inquiries

Giving relevant answers to customer questions can improve the company's image and
reputation of being an organization that offers good service quality.
Use customer feedback to make improvements
Encouraging customer feedback can help an organization understand the areas where they can
improve their service quality. Implementing those changes can show customers that the
company is listening to their wishes and is willing to modify its services
accordingly.Related: What Is the GAP Model of Service Quality? (With Examples)

Provide a friendly and efficient experience

Regardless of the services that your company provides, a well-implemented customer
interaction system can increase efficiency by allowing employees to process each customer
with ease. A smooth customer experience, in general, can serve to improve or reinforce a
customer's perception of the organization's service quality.

Make sure that customer-facing employees are familiar with all services
All employees who interact with customers need to have extensive knowledge regarding the
company's services so they can effectively explain them to customers. This can enhance the
customer's perception of the company's ability to deliver quality services.Related: 4 Levels of
Customer Service: Definitions and Tips

Be honest regarding your services

When customers inquire about a service or need to decide between multiple options, it is
usually best for the company to be completely honest with them and fully disclose all the pros
and cons of their choice. This can improve customer trust and therefore increase the chance of
that customer returning.
SERVICE DESIGN
What is Service Design?
Service design is a process where designers create sustainable solutions and optimal
experiences for both customers in unique contexts and any service providers involved.
Designers break services into sections and adapt fine-tuned solutions to suit all users’ needs in
context—based on actors, location and other factors.
“When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sells the exact same
coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the
other.”

— 31Volts Service Design Studio

Service Design is about Designing for the Biggest Picture
Users don’t access brands in a vacuum, but within complex chains of interactions. For example,
a car is a product, but in service design terms it’s a tool when an elderly customer wants to book
an Uber ride to visit a friend in hospital. There’s much to consider in such contexts. This user
might be accessing Uber on a smartphone, which she’s still learning to use. Perhaps she’s
infirm, too, lives in an assisted living facility and must inform the driver about her specific needs.
Also, she’s not the only user involved here. Other users are any service providers attached to
her user experience. For example, the driver that customer books also uses Uber—but
experiences a different aspect of it. To cater to various users’ and customers’ contexts as a
designer, you must understand these sorts of relations between service receivers and service
providers and the far-reaching aspects of their contexts from start to finish. Only then can
you ideate towards solutions for these users’/customers’ specific ecosystems while you
ensure brands can deliver on expectations optimally and sustainably.
In service design, you work within a broad scope including user experience (UX)
design and customer experience (CX) design. To design for everyone concerned, you must
appreciate the macro- and micro-level factors that affect their realities.

A service design experience often involves multiple channels, contexts and products.
Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, authors of This is Service Design Thinking, identify five
key principles—for service design to be:
1. User-centered – Use qualitative research to design focusing on all users.
2. Co-creative – Include all relevant stakeholders in the design process.
3. Sequencing – Break a complex service into separate processes and user journey
sections.
 4. Evidencing – Envision service experiences to make them tangible for users to
understand and trust brands.
5. Holistic – Design for all touchpoints throughout experiences, across networks of users
and interactions.
Designers increasingly work more around services than around physical products—e.g., SaaS
(software as a service). Meanwhile, with advances in digital technology continually redefining
what users can expect whenever they proceed towards goals, brands focus on maximizing
convenience and removing barriers for their users. A digital example is Square, which
unbundles point-of-sale systems from cash registers and rebundles smartphones as potential
point-of-sale systems.
How to Do Service Design Best
First, identify these vital parts of any service encounter:
1. Actors (e.g., employees delivering the service)
2. Location (e.g., a virtual environment where customers receive the service)
3. Props (e.g., objects used during service delivery)
4. Associates (other organizations involved in providing the service – e.g., logistics)
5. Processes (e.g., workflows used to deliver the service)
You’ll need to define problems, iterate and address all dimensions of the customers’, users’ and
business needs best in a holistic design. To begin, you must empathize with all relevant
users/customers. These are some of the most common tools:
1. Customer journey maps(to find the customers’ touchpoints, barriers and critical
moments)
2. Personas (to help envision target users)
3. Service blueprints (elevated forms of customer journey maps that help reveal the full
spectrum of situations where users/customers can interact with brands)
You should use these to help leverage insights to account for such vital areas
as accessibility and customer reengagement.
Service blueprints are an important tool in the service design process.

Do Service Design for the Complete Experience

Remember to design for the complete experience. That means you should accommodate your
users’/customers’ environment/s and the various barriers, motivations and feelings they’ll have.
Here are some core considerations:
1. Understand your brand’s purpose, the demand for it and the ability of all
associated service providers to deliver on promises.
2. The customers’ needs come ahead of the brand’s internal ones.
3. Focus on delivering unified and efficient services holistically—as opposed to taking
a component-by-component approach.
4. Include input from users.
5. Streamline work processes to maximize efficiency.
6. Co-creation sessions are vital to prototyping.
7. Eliminate anything (e.g., features, work processes) that fails to add value for
customers.
8. Use agile development to adapt to ever-changing customer needs.
Service design applies both to not-so-tangible areas (e.g., riders buying a single Uber trip) and
tangible ones (e.g., iPhone owners visiting Apple Store for assistance/repairs). Overall, service
design is a conversation where you should leave your users and customers satisfied at all
touchpoints, delighted to have encountered your brand.
Service Design - Design is Not Just for Products
Service design is concerned with the design of services and making them better suit the needs
of the service’s users and customers. It examines all activities, infrastructure, communication,
people, and material components involved in the service to improve both quality of service and
interactions between the provider of the service and its customers.
The objective of service design is to formulate both front office and back office strategies that
meet the customers’ needs in the most relevant way whilst remaining economic (or sustainable)
for the service provider. Ideal services are considered to be user-friendly and competitive within
their market.
There are many different disciplines that comprise service design. The most common
are ethnography, information and management sciences, interaction design and process
design.
Service design is used both to create new services and to improve the performance of existing
services. As Matt Beale, from the Carnegie School of Design says; “Design is about making
things good (and then better) and right (and fantastic) for the people who use and encounter
them.”
A Brief History of Service Design
In 1982, the term “service design” was coined by Lynn Shostack. They considered service
design to be a responsibility of marketing and of management. It was proposed that a business
should develop a “service blueprint” which details the processes within a company and how
each process interacts with other processes. While this blueprint was initially only used for
service design – it has now become a tool for managing operational efficiency as well.
The service design blueprint clearly articulates the interactions between each part of the
process.
Then in 1991, Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff (of Köln International School of Design - KISD) proposed
that service design be considered a design discipline. He would go on to form an international
conglomerate of universities that provided service design education and a network for
academics and professionals involved in the discipline.
This network then proposed some structure for the discipline:
"[Service Design] is an emerging discipline and an existing body of knowledge, which can
dramatically improve the productivity and quality of services.
Service Design provides a systematic and creative approach to:
 meeting service organisations’ need to be competitive
 meeting customers’ rising expectations of choice and quality
 making use of the technologies’ revolution, that multiplies the possibilities for creating,
delivering and consuming services
 answering the pressing environmental, social and economic challenges to sustainability
 fostering innovative social models and behaviours
 sharing knowledge & learning”
They also provided the format for a service designer’s responsibilities:
“The Service Designer can:
 visualise, express and choreograph what other people can’t see, envisage solutions that
do not yet exist
 observe and interpret needs and behaviours and transform them into possible service
futures
 express and evaluate, in the language of experiences, the quality of design”
As well as setting out expectations for the way service design would perform:
 “Service Design aims to create services that are Useful, Useable, Desirable, Efficient &
Effective
 Service Design is a human-centred approach that focuses on customer experience and
the quality of service encounter as the key value for success.
 Service Design is a holistic approach, which considers in an integrated way strategic,
system, process and touchpoint design decisions.
 Service Design is a systematic and iterative process that integrates user-oriented, team-
based, interdisciplinary approaches and methods, in ever-learning cycles."
While these definitions have evolved a little over the years – they remain the core ethos of
service design and what service designers should do in their work
(c) Annant2015, Fair Use
Service Design fits neatly into all industries – including those managed by ITIL process (shown
here).
Service Design Methodology
Morelli proposed in 2006 that service design methodologies should operate in 3 directions:
 The actors on the service must be identified and defined with respect to the service. This
can be done using analytical tools.
  The service scenarios should be defined. Then user cases should be developed and
sequenced to reflect the interactions with the actors.
 The service should be then represented using diagrams and written elements as
required to show all the physical components, actors, interactions and sequences.
The tools for analysis can involve social studies, ethnographic studies, anthropology, etc. these
areas offer an incredible number of tools and care should be taken to select the right tool for the
service design project.
Design tools are used to create the blueprint of the service and the nature and characteristics of
the interactions that fall within it. These tools include (but are not limited to) development of
service scenarios and use cases. These tools are similar to those employed in software design
and UX designers should have little trouble adapting to them. It is worth noting that in service
design these tools tend to be broader in scope and accommodate management techniques
(such as Kaizen, Just-In-Time – JIT, Total Quality Management – TQM, etc.). Care should be
taken when selecting management techniques as in many service systems customer
interactions are too loosely defined to be forced into the narrow path of quality management
(which was originally designed for manufacturing).
Blueprints can be any useful form of diagram which elicits the services’ scope. Storyboards are
often the preferred tool but there is no requirement for this and designers should choose the tool
which suits them and the project best.
The Take Away
Service design is every bit as important as product design and UX designers will find that as
web products evolve to become web services, they are more and more involved in service
design. The good news is that the core skills of UX design are similar when it comes to service
design – they are just altered somewhat in scope.

(c) _dChris, Fair Use

Service design methodologies are very similar to existing UX methodologies. UX designers may
find big opportunities in this field.
Learn more about Service Design
Take a deep dive into Service Design with our course Service Design: How to Design
Integrated Service Experiences .1

Services are everywhere! When you get a new passport, order a pizza or make a reservation on
AirBnB, you're engaging with services. How those services are designed is crucial to whether
they provide a pleasant experience or an exasperating one. The experience of a service is
essential to its success or failure no matter if your goal is to gain and retain customers for
your app or to design an efficient waiting system for a doctor’s office.
In a service design process, you use an in-depth understanding of the business and its
customers to ensure that all the touchpoints of your service are perfect and, just as
importantly, that your organization can deliver a great service experience every time. It’s not
just about designing the customer interactions; you also need to design the entire ecosystem
surrounding those interactions.
In this course, you’ll learn how to go through a robust service design process and which
methods to use at each step along the way. You’ll also learn how to create a service design
culture in your organization and set up a service design team. We’ll provide you with lots of
case studies to learn from as well as interviews with top designers in the field. For each
practical method, you’ll get downloadable templates that guide you on how to use the
methods in your own work.
This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a
complete service design project. The exercises are optional, but you’ll get invaluable hands-
on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because
they will teach you to take your first steps as a service designer. What’s equally important is that
you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future
employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in service
design.
Your primary instructor in the course is Frank Spillers. Frank is CXO of award-winning design
agency Experience Dynamics and a service design expert who has consulted with companies
all over the world. Much of the written learning material also comes from John
Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi, both Professors in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie
Mellon University and highly influential in establishing design research as we know it today.