Question

• Which of the 4 provider gaps do you believe is the most difficult to address?

Answer 1

ANSWER: Provider gaps refer to the difference between the customer expectations from the service and organsiation understanding on customer wants. The four main types of provider gap are gap in listening, service design and standards gap, service performance gap, and the gap in communication. Among all of them in my opinion the service performance gap is most difficult. It occurs as a result of disparity between the driven standards by the customers and the actual service performance by the employees. The main factors contributing to it are deficiencies in Human Resource policies, customers who not fulfil their roles, service intermediaries’ problems, and failure to match the supply and demand. It is most difficult because customers lack knowledge of their responsibilities thus affect each other negatively. It is a hard task to settle service quality and consistency with service intermediaries as there is always a problem how much control and power to be provided to intermediaries. Furthermore it is difficult to forecast the according to peaks and valleys of demand.