Right the second time

28th of July 2016
Right the second time

Dutch reporter Nico Lemmens continues his discussion of aspects of service management, as developed by Christian Grönroos in his book ‘Service Management and Marketing’.

Grönroos introduced a service-oriented approach to quality in 1982 with the concept of perceived service quality.

Services are more or less subjectively experienced processes where production and consumption activities take place simultaneously. Interactions, including a series of moments of truth between the customer and the service provider, occur. What happens in these interactions, so-called buyer-seller interactions or service encounters, will obviously have a critical impact on the perceived service.

Basically, the quality of a service, as customers perceive it, has two dimensions: a technical or outcome dimension and a functional or process-related dimension.

What customers receive in their interactions with a firm is clearly important to them and their quality evaluation. However, this is only one quality dimension. In the service literature this is called the outcome quality. Grönroos refers to this as the technical service quality.

Frequently, but not always, this dimension can be measured relatively objectively. Technical quality is by no means the only dimension that determines the customer’s total quality perception. The customer will also be influenced by the way the technical quality has been transferred.

Examples of this so-called functional quality are the accessibility of an ATM or a website, the appearance and behaviour of bank staff, the responsiveness of a service provider, his ability to correct or compensate mistakes.

There is a remarkable paradox: the delivery of perfect service quality often does not result in a positive quality perception by the customer, because it is seen as normal. A hassle free holiday flight will not often be a topic of conversation with friends and relatives, whereas a flight that was overbooked, and the overbooked economy seat was compensated with a business seat, will be perceived as excellent service. Quick and excellent recovery performance in case of problems is in many cases the most important driver for generating positive service quality perception.

The industrial production quality maxim ‘right the first time’ is not valid in many cases of service quality and should therefore be replaced by the maxim ‘right the second time’. In other words technical service quality is a necessary, but not sufficient prerequisite for generating positive service quality perception. This has consequences for the design and organisation of (service) quality management systems.

Prevention systems should be supplemented with recovery systems. And there is one final consequence: the ultra professional modern service firm should aim at deliberately producing problems, mistakes and complaints in a well measured manner, in order to redress them in an excellent way and by doing so, creating a positive quality perception. Or would this be an absurd conclusion?

 

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