Question

1. What is a “Service Guarantee”? Define it, and provide examples. Do you like (or dislike) the guarantee program you have just shown as examples? Tell me why.  
2. Service quality can be assessed by both soft and hard measures. Explain the difference between the two types of measures by using examples.

Answer 1

Service Guarantee

Service offerings are largely intangible in nature. Customers are thus unable to assess the purchase outcome prior to experience, rendering the risk of possible customer dissatisfaction very high.In simple words service guarantee is a marketing tool which is used by the companies to reduce consumer risk perception.

Definition

Various definitions of service guarantees can be found in the literature. For instance, Hart, Schlesinger and Maher define a service guarantee as ‘…a statement explaining the service customers can expect (the promise) and what the company will do if it fails to deliver (the payout).’

Callan and Moore (1998) state that, ‘a service guarantee can be represented as a promise to the customer and is often advertised as such.’

For example;If Iam purchasing an electronic device,the compnay offers me service guarantee.(Mobiles,TV,Refrigerator,etc)

Of course ilike these kind of guarantee programmes.Because the comopany is offering me a promise.And I can contact them without hesitating for an after sales service.And I can refer to my freinds if the company fulfil their promise or the guarantee.

Service quality Assessment

Soft and Hard Measures of Service Quality

Soft standards and measures

Soft standards and measures of service quality are those that cannot easily be observed and must be collected by talking to customers, or employees.Soft measures provide direction, guidance and feedback to employees in ways to achieve customer satisfaction and can be quantified by measuring customer perceptions and beliefs.SERVQUAL is an example of a sophisticated soft measurement system.

Analysis of customers’ complaints,guest surveys used by hotels,ongoing surveys of account holders by telephone or post are some of the possible techniques of soft measures.

Hard standards and measures

Hard standards and measures relate to those characteristics and activities that can be counted, timed or measured through audits.Measures may include such thing as how many telephone calls were abandoned while the customer was on hold, how many minutes customers had to wait in line at a particular stage inservice delivery, the time required to complete a specific task,the temperature of a particular food item, how many trains,arrived late, how many bags were lost, how many patients madea complete recovery following a specific type of operations andhow many orders were filled correctly.

The Fishbone Chart is a cause and affect analysis employeea technique first developed by the Japanese quality expert Kaoru Ishikawa. Groups of managers andstaff brainstorm all the possible reasons that might causea specific problem

Control charts are also example for Hard standards.