Question

How do organizations manage service quality as a branding strategy?

Answer 1

Service Quality refers to the difference between customer expectations & service provider's actual performance. Some of the factors that affect the service quality are like :- ease of access & approachability of srvices, Aesthetics, attentiveness/ helpfulness of the service staff provider,cleanlinessof the premises, comfort of the customer, commitment of the management to solve customer problems, competence & reliability of the service provider, security of information 7 good health of customers etc.

When brands seek to refine their customer engagement strategy, a critical aspect of it is ensuring that contact center customer service operations are running smoothly. To achieve this, it is necessary to assess not only individual service agent performance but also the quality management practices of the organization in place. Some of the ways of improving service quality are as follows:-

• Encourage agent feedback :- Agents are on the front lines of customer service and have a detailed knowledge of what customer expectations may be. Encouraging agent feedback regarding improved customer service practices is therefore crucial, while peer feedback can also encourage team building and allow agents to learn from peer experiences.
• Have service agents listen to their calls :- During coaching sessions, agents should be given the chance to listen to their customer calls when discussing which points to improve. By breaking down the process and closely analyzing points such as tone, thoroughness, and ability to achieve first call resolution, agents can get a better sense of what their service looks like and hence make improvements.
• Send post-contact surveys after every interaction :- In a contact center’s customer service operations, the customer should always come first. This means that customer feedback is just as critical as any peer or supervisor feedback, and a good service quality management demands consistent requests for feedback after each service interaction.
• Open up more channels for customer feedback :- Customers need many and varied means of communicating with the business org. Card mailed with a physical product, a feedback box on the counter, a social media competition or an evening focus group are some of the modern customer feedback channels.
• Establish clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) :- It is important for all contact center employees to know what KPIs to strive for, so establishing clear goals by the organization for the customer service employees is necessary.
• Evaluate regularly :- Service agents should be coached and evaluated on a regular basis to consistently help them in improving their performance. For example, monitoring calls once a week and providing swift feedback allows agents to work on their performance regularly.
• Giving a personal touch to the customer service :- In this digital age, the unexpected arrival of a handwritten note can work wonders for revitalizing worn out old business relationships. This can work just as well with employees and suppliers as it can with customers. The new marketing trends are actually all about personalization.
• Hire for right customer service executives :- The organization needs to think first about what kind of customer service culture it wishes to create, and thus can hire its next employee accordingly.
• Empower employees to resolve issues :- Instead of giving all the resposibities to the customer service mananger, the org. should try empowering all its employees to resolve customer service issues on their own initiative. Because making only one manager responsible for the maintenance of the entire service quality would create work overload as well as various bottlenecks in the service delivery process.
• Provide a rich learning environment for your team :- The customer service team, along with the rest of the employees, should always be learning -  developing their content skills, their interpersonal relationship skills, their technical expertise, their time management skills, all of which finally add up to improvement in the customer service arena.
• Practice active listening with customers :- What do the customers want from the customer service team? To do so, the service reps and customer-facing staff need to be trained in the art and science of active listenig. The service staff should be trained to listen carefully to get to the heart of the customer problem, reflect back what the client is saying to them, and take appropriate and detailed documentation to provide a basis for follow-up.
• Strengthen the customer service strategy with data :- Almost every customer interaction opens up the potential for valuable data collection - data that will be able to underpin the company’s future directions with hard evidence. This data actually provides tremendous opportunity to radically overhaul the company's customer service strategy in the future. The data provides basics on the client characteristics. They provide the co. with a better ability to understand who best customers are, and what, when and where they are buying. The collected customer data allow the co. to know how to retain the existing customers & how to gain potential new customers through advanced service quality.
• Take a team approach to eliminate bias :- Service Quality management can be subjective, so taking a team approach to analyzing employee performance is a good way to eliminate bias. Having managers coach agents from another contact center team or exchanging peer feedback across teams are some of the ways to achieve this.

In the current world, due to high competitive pressures, one of the most significant strategies through which the organizations can achieve sustainable competitive advantage is improving the quality of their services. Different market researches conducted heve indicated that improving the quality of service brings valuable results for organizations and finally it leads to satisfaction and loyalty of customers and to gain more market share and profitability for organization.
On the other hand, branding strategy, as another competetive strategy can help various businesses and organizations in achieving their performances. Due to high cost of creating new brand, organizations invest on their current brands in order to maximize their profit by increasing the brand value and to have more reputation in the today’s competetive arena.Relying on external brands such as brand equity, brand identity, and brand personality, customers determine and understand the quality of service. These factors are more important for net services such as insurance in which the quality of the provided services is less tangible and it only gets relative in many of the transactions. The quality of service in the insurance industry depends to performance of employees and assets and resources of this industry. Therefore, the insurance companies have realized that they should improve the quality of service provided to their customers in order to attract and retain their customers.

Quality of service is considered as an organizational asset and important financial performance and marketing factor of the company. By increasing efficiency and effectiveness in service providing, the profitability of the organization increases. Improving the level of service quality can help an organization differentiate itself from other organizations.

Brand identity is one of the most important issues in the field of marketing. Brand identity shows that how an organization wants to be perceived in the market. Each organization transfers its identity to customer through branding and marketing strategies. A brand has a distinctive identity when it provides relevant, durable, and believable promises regarding the value of the product, service. One brand with a strong identity is a safer place for customers because it leads to reduced uncertainty, in purchasing and consuming a product.

In an insurance company, reserches have shown that the five dimensions of service quality (tangible factors, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy) have positive impact on brand identity and personality. It is recommended for the insurance company managers and its representatives to use modern physical facilities in the location where services are provided. It is also recommended for employers of the Insurance Company and its representatives to perform their task at specified time to maintain the reliability of the company and its branches for customers because customers expect better and quick responsiveness by managers.Managers and employees of the insurance company and its representatives must be sensitive to customer requests and complaints. The employees should allocate enough time for customers and guide them in choosing the insurance type that provides the best benefits for customers.

Another example in the service sector is the hotel industry. Brand image is one of the key components that enable hotels to gain superior advantage over their rivals. Marketing experts emphasized the extreme importance of brand image for service firms because when the customers use service, they see the firm and its resources by their judgment of the interaction between them and their service providers. According to the various researches conducted in the hotel industry, it can be concluded that only empathy, responsiveness and reliability perceptions were drivers to building hotel brand image.