Customer First: Understanding Customers
Customers play a critical role in all businesses, but for services, and the scientific understanding of service businesses, customers are especially important. In this chapter, the service encounter is considered from the perspective of customers includin
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Customer First: Understanding Customers
Key Themes • What role do customers play in service businesses? • How is value created and what types of values are created by service businesses? • The customer interface and co-creation • Customer value • Service quality • Tailor made and standardized services • Service experiences • Customer loyalty • Complaints management • Outsourcing and service offshoring Customers play a critical role in all businesses, but for services, and the scientific understanding of service businesses, customers are especially important. Traditionally, it was assumed that all services were produced during the moment of consumption and could not be stored (Grönroos 1990). Traditional services are tailor-made meeting the needs of individual customers; customers are part of the production and delivery process participating in the co-creation of service experiences or service encounters. This does not necessarily imply that customers are directly engaged in service production unless the service experience has been constructed using a self-service Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-520601_8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
approach. The delivery of a service is about solving customer problems or needs; the customer must define the problem and make decisions regarding possible solutions. Customer involvement in service production and delivery plays a central role in marketing services and in the discipline of service science, and this is even the case for the provision of standardized service solutions. This is to emphasize the importance of the service encounter (Czepiel et al. 1985) (see Chap. 6) whereby service providers and customers negotiate which services should be delivered and how they should be delivered. Reading and managing a service business involves understanding the interrelationships between customers, marketing and service operations. The service encounter, or the interactions between service providers and customers, is the basis for the development of a special service marketing approach in which service firms try to ensure that customers appreciate the qualities of the delivered service and of the service firm. The aim is to create satisfied customers who are more likely to make repeat purchases and to develop some form of attachment with the service provider and its employees. The key challenge is: ‘how can a service firm create customer satisfaction?’ leading to repeat purchase. This challenge is explored in this chapter before examining the service marketing approach in Chap. 9. In this chapter, the service encounter is considered from the perspective of customers including a focus on: ‘what creates customer
© The Author(s) 2020 J. R. Bryson et al., Service Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52060-1_8
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satisfaction?’ and ‘what do customers want, and why?’ To explore these questions requires a discussio
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