Question

1. Why might customer actions and attitudes cause the service performance gap to occur ? Use your own examples to illustrate your understanding?

2. Describe a situation when your satisfaction was decreased because something another customer did. Could the organisation have done anything to manage this situation more effectively? If so, what?

3. Discuss a service that customer co-produce and outline specific tasks that customers need to undertake to satisfactorily produce the service.

Answer 1

Service performance gap due to customer actions can occur if:

• If Customer Participation inevitable at some stage or other
• Customers indispensible to service production
• If customer is not willing to be an Audience of service
• If customers can detract from the successful delivery like accommodation and room service unhappiness in a hotel
• If customers may be unwilling to perform their role; may look for rewards
• Your Service is dependent on what other customers do like Hair cut in a salon

Situation-Enquiring about a product on Twitter with Amazon:

• During Twitter Website navigation, read reviews about a specific product, Tweeted for it.
• After 2-3 mins, another consumer tweeted of bad reviews of the product and bad delivery by Amazon.
• I saw few more negative reviews in Tweets about similar issues from other dissatisfied customers
• For the whole day Amazon did not reply to my Tweet.
• Next day it made me worried about the bad performance of Amazon and negative reviews might be true and hence, I decided no more to look for that product on Amazon and went on other sites like Flipkart, Snapdeal etc.
• If Amazon could have at least responded to my Enquiry, I could have at least made my mood to check for more product details with Amazon

Service- Staying in a hotel:

• While booking a hotel, customer need to properly mentioed the requirement of - location, kind of room, what amenities are required, what’s his/ her budget etc., else it can create a chaos at the very beginning of staying/ booking a hotel room
• During Room service/ Housekeeping service, a customer if dislikes the hygiene in room/ toilet or does not like the way of talking/ tone/ body gestures of housekeeping staff, intentionally or un-intentionally, it could result in bad reputation of the hotel staff, create a mess situation and may even cost staff their jobs, even if they were faulty or not.
• Hence, even a customer should be careful about the service level and service scope. A slight misunderstanding can create a bad situation with someone to pay a heavy cost.