Service Marketing / Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm, Valeria A. Zeithaml, Mary Jo Bitner, Dwayne D. Gremler

This book provides a complete explanation and description how a company can improve the services it is delivering to customers. It starts with setting the focus on customers and how to understand them and goes further with concepts of delivering and managing services. I will shortly describe a few of the more innovative and case-important concepts explained in the book and add some page number that everybody can read deeper into the topic if wanted.

The main focus when talking about services is normally the customers. Finding his needs, demands and problems and delivering an individual, appropriate solution. This book takes it a little bit further by broadening the focus and including the employee of the service providing company.  It points out that delivering a service to a customer is an employee-to-customer interaction and not between the company and the customer. Because of this the authors also challenges the companies to have a service culture in their organization culture. They suggest that it should be natural to deliver good services to customers as well as to internals. (Page 348ff) 

Due to the fact that Aktia wants to increase the number of customers in the next years, regarding to the annual report, I want to present the concept of customer relationship the authors are providing. The different phases of a CR are strangers, acquaintances, friends and partners. In the first phase the most import is to get the customer aware of the company by special offers and competitive advantages, during being acquaintances the company should put much effort in satisfying the customer therefor knowledge of the individual customer is already needed. During the friends phase trust should develop and the final stage of partners includes all the previous parts and demands individualistic solutions.(Page 177ff)

Our main task is to invent an innovative service for the Aktia bank, so I want to explain the process the book is suggesting for service innovation and development as long it stays in the front end planning because we cannot go on to the implementation. The first step to do so is a review of the company’s strategy, because a service will not work out with if it does not fit with it. After this the strategy of the service itself has to be defined, whether it is to attract new customers or hold old in the company. Then the Idea Generating starts with quite free ideas which go further during the Service Concept Development to more concreter with where the documentation is very important because of the intangible nature of a service. The last step in the front end planning is the Business Analysis where the profitability and cost planning takes place. To follow these steps is in my opinion quite important because otherwise a lot of time would be spent during the generating of ideas which could be useless afterwards.(Page 257ff)

I hope these blog will contribute to everybody’s work, and if you have any questions concerning it, just comment on the blog ;)



Johannes // Spring is coming!!!!