Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customer's need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery. For example, Florida Power & Light has developed a sophisticated, computer-based lightening tracking system to anticipate where weather-related service interruptions might occur and strategically position crews at these locations to quicken recovery response time. Offering a service that customers expect to be available at all times and that they will miss only when the lights go out, FPL focuses its energies on matching customer perceptions with potential need. Deluxe Corporation, America's highly successful check printer, regularly exceeds its customers' expectations by shipping nearly 95% of all orders by the day after the orders were received. Deluxe even put U.S. Postal Service stations inside its plants to speed up delivery time. Customer expectations change over time. To anticipate these changes, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company regularly monitors the expectations and perceptions of their customers, using focus group interviews and the authors' 22-item generic SERVQUAL questionnaire, which is customized by adding questions covering specific aspects of service they wish to track. The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service -- reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles -- goes right to the heart of the tendency to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceived quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.

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General Marketing & Sales : The Art of Selling to the Affluent: How to Attract, Service, and Retain Wealthy Customers and Clients for Life

Price: $18.99 USD

General Marketing & Sales : The Art of Selling to the Affluent: How to Attract, Service, and Retain Wealthy Customers and Clients for Life

Price: $27.95 USD

General Marketing & Sales : From Products to Services: Insights and experience from companies which have embraced the service economy

Price: $35.99 USD

Customer Service Intelligence uses a wide range of management and educational theories to provide different approaches that can be incorporated as part of the customer service trainer's toolkit. Concepts such as: . emotional intelligence . behaviour modification . role modelling . dimensions of procedure and conviviality . expectancy theory . socio-cultural concepts of (service) community . customer service as dynamic 'object' in activity theory . Zen mindfulness all form the basis of training design in different contexts. Some trainers are dealing with new employees in fast food environments, others are retraining engineers in customer service provision as part of a strategic marketing initiative. This book enables the trainer to review the context for training and select the most appropriate approach to take. The training design is thus carefully thought through for maximum impact on the audience. Professionalism in customer service training is essential for the growth of many industries. This complex and challenging task is assisted by these perspectives, recommendations and case studies. * A wide range of management and educational theories provide different approaches for the customer service trainer * case studies and examples bring customer service intelligence to life. * Takes customer service training to a new level, viewing customer service as a complex social interaction.

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General Marketing & Sales : From Products to Services: Insights and experience from companies which have embraced the service economy

Price: $55.00 USD

Managing strategies for professional service firms is an important and complex activity. The main issues in this book cover the core management principles for service firms in a comprehensive way. Based on current research findings it includes the management of service quality, knowledge and marketing as well as people, organizational and strategic issues. In understanding critical resources managers and partners will be able to effectively develop and exploit them. The book contains practical advice and offers a profound insight into the managerial excellence of service companies.

Price: $139.00 USD

The 9th International Research Seminar in Service Management founded by Pierre Eiglier and Eric Langeard in 1990 was held in La Londe, France, in Spring 2006. It was a success in terms of the quality of the papers presented, and the number of scholars who attended it. This e-book of the International Journal of Service Industry Management features five stimulating papers that were presented at the Seminar. They reflect the spirit as well as the content of the Seminar. They include a mix of conceptual thinking and field research; a mix of nationalities and a mix of disciplines, marketing, human resources management, strategy, and operations which constitute the heart and the wealth of services as a research area.

Price: $199.00 USD

About the Guest Editor Jay Kandampully is an Associate Professor in services management, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Ipswich, Australia, and a visiting Professor at the REIMS Management School, France. Jay also serves as the Editor of the international journal, Managing Service Quality.

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Ethics in marketing: sea change or Potemkin village? While marketers might define marketing ethics as something like moral principles governing right and wrong behaviour in marketing, increasingly cynical consumers might well claim that the expression is actually an oxymoron. For example, as discussed by Rotfeld (2005) the marketing function can be heavily criticised for encouraging conspicuous consumption of unnecessary goods, bombarding customers with SPAM, disregarding customer privacy, wasteful packaging of goods, misleading pricing structures; the list of supposedly unethical marketing practices goes on and on. A number of excellent case studies can be found in Davidson (2003). With the rising brand profile of organisations such as Coop Bank or the Body Shop that have put ethics at the centre of their business operations, many businesses are jumping on the ethical bandwagon in their search for customer approval through similar differentiation. However, if the reality of their marketing operations does not live up to the ethical rhetoric that they preach, these businesses risk global exposure of their shortcomings on the Internet by disappointed customers or eager pressure groups (Golin, 2003). The very nature of ethical debate centres upon the grey area between the legal and the illegal. Recent legislation such as the Distance Selling Directive and updates to the Data Protection Act poses new marketing challenges across all industry sectors. But the law cannot keep up with rapid developments in technology. In the realm of the Internet for example, many of the ethical issues are still finding legal precedent and the law has yet to provide sufficient guidance on how business should behave. One hopeful trend for marketers is the evolution of new voluntary standards such as AA1000 (developed by the Institute for Social and Ethical Accountability), the Global Reporting Initiative (developed by a wide range of international organisations), and Project Sigma (a sustainability management standard under development by the British Standards Institution and Forum for the Future). This Special Issue of Qualitative Marketing Research: An International Journal provides insights from a range of perspectives as to how these pitfalls might be avoided and ethical marketing actually achieved in practice. It seeks to bring together the academic and business community in order to stimulate further debate and discussion of these contemporary issues and hence formulate a way forward for marketers. In particular it covers such diverse subjects as green marketing; advertising directed at children; the behaviour of ethical consumers in terms of their lifestyles and purchasing patterns; erotic retailing on the high street; wine marketing; and the role of new technology in empowering customer service employees. Each author has specifically considered the special theme of this issue, namely if the focus of their research has hi

Price: $199.00 USD