Experience 1: A Delightful Experience at St. Regis Hotel
Question:
Write a reflection journal based on your memorable personal encounters of service received from, or provided to, the learning teams, family and any other groups.
It is the experience which settles in the heart and mind of the customer and he feels delighted with the experience. This kind of experience helps in building a strong relationship with the customer and is a strong attribute which let the person become a positive motivator for the company(Sigit, Suharyono & Imam, 2015)
This is an incident which happened with me last year when I went to spend vacation with my family in South Korea, Seoul. I was travelling with my entire family and had planned 3 days and 2 nights stay at St. Regis. Right after entering the hotel I was amazed with the kind of hospitality I was encountered with, the hotel staff was extremely well behaved and mannered. During one of the evenings we went outside for shopping and site seeing, unfortunately one bag in which all the passports and cash was kept got stolen at one of the shops where we went for shopping. We all were extremely sad and had no clue with what has to be done next, as number one we did not know their language and secondly we had no idea of what has to be done. The hotel came to our rescue in this moment of grief and they got us in touch with the local police authorities and were with us until our bag was found. The 3 membered team of hotel communicated the problem to the police, showed empathy towards us, helped us financially and ensured that our bag was found. It was a delightful experience on financial, emotional and social fronts.
I had a terrible incident when for the first time I went to purchase platinum rings for my parents on their 25th Marriage Anniversary, I thought it would be a great gesture to gift them something which they would relish for their lives. I went to one of the Tiffany stores in Singapore and purchased two Platinum 950 rings (10 grams each), it costs a fortune, but as it was for parents and I had completed my study and gotten my job, I thought it would be a nice gesture that my parents would relish. After a month or so, one fine day my mom called saying the platinum ring has started to get lacklustre, the shine is going and it is getting black, surprised and shocked I was to the core. I went to the store with the rings, the customer service people said that this is not their fault; it is because of the daily wear and tear. I explained them, my mother is a professor and she never even uses water with the ring on, she takes utmost care of it, but they denied. Someone gave me their customer care number, after waiting through ages when I got through a representative, he was first of all extremely rude and then he said okay I have registered your complaint and someone will get back to you. I waited for a month, but when nobody called me I got fruited and shoot a mail to their customer service department. After a slew of mails for almost 3 months, somebody responded and requested me to visit the store. On reaching the store, I was advised that the problem is not because of the faulty jewellery but it was our fault, but still if I pay 60 per cent of the money I paid to purchase the ring, they would replace it as a sign of good gesture. I was angry and frustrated to the core and just stormed out of the store. No one ever contacted me, and I was like disappointed in the company.
Experience 2: A Terrible Incident at Tiffany
Need: The need of the hour was to find the bag, as it had all the passports of the families and the converted currency, hence finding the bag was the prerequisite as our flight was due the day following tomorrow
Intent/Approach: The immediate intent was to find somebody who would be able to help us at the time of emergency. As mentioned earlier we were delighted with the excellent customer service the hotel staff provided us, they were warm, friendly and understanding of our needs and did everything possible to make us feel welcomed and comfortable. Hence, ringing the hotel was the first thing that came to our mind. It was a stressful situation and we had no info on locale police stations neither did know anyone in the city.
Service Provider Situation: We went to the city of Seoul around the new year’s, the busy period for the hotel, with almost all the rooms occupied and conferences happening in the ball roams, it was a jam packed hotel with all the staff busy in servicing the customers. The entire staffs of the hotel were involved in something or the other but still were caring enough to go an extra mile for the customers.
Satisfaction level: A customer satisfaction is guaranteed by ensuring that the customer fits into the triangle of Strategy, systems and the people. The satisfaction level is when the increasing demand of services grows from basic to expect till desire until unanticipated satisfaction level hits the customer. Exactly the same happened with us
Customers these days have become highly aware and increasingly demanding, they do not want just high quality of product or services but a more excellent customer service. Primarily there are 5 types of service gap an organization must address to in order to give excellent service quality (Skalen, 2015)
The Customer Gap: Gap between customer expectation and perception (Dixit, 2014)
Customer service gap is the difference between the customer expectations and the customer preference (Zurich, 2017). Expectation is what the customer expects according to the available resources and partly influenced by cultural background, family, lifestyle, demographics, advertising etc. (Nguyen, 2015). On the other hand perception is derived from the satisfaction the customer derives after using the service and the quality of service delivery (Jain, 2015)
The knowledge Gap: The gap between consumer expectation and the management perception (Constantinides, Schepers & Vries, 2015)
The policy gap: The gap between management perception and service quality specification (Jennings, 2016)
The delivery Gap: The gap between service quality specification and service delivery (Harpaz & Heinmann, 2016)
The communication gap: The gap between service delivery and external communication (Storti, 2015)
Success factors can be understood as those attribute depicted in the customer service which leads to customer delight, an experience which stays in his head for long and the client decides to associate with the company for long. Such was the case with my interaction with St. Regis hotel in their customer handling and I have now become a loyal customer and spread a positive word of mouth whenever possible
Customer Service Gaps and Success Factors
Great Listening: A customer values when his problem is being listened to and the rep is doing his best to comprehend the problem. A customer feels valued and is able to open up once he realizes that his problem is being listened (Loureiro, 2014)
Fixing the problem: The customer should be comforted that anything to everything will be done in order to fix the problem, because almost problem solving changes nothing, problem solving changes everything (Wong, 2013)
Understand value of customer: It should be understood by the company that positive word of mouth is one of the most important tool for getting good business and this can be ensured by understanding his value, that if he is happy, he will be a promoter and spread positive WOM else otherwise (Orel & Kara, 2014)
Keeping the brand promises: Every company has its brand values, primarily , customer service, customer centricity etc., but if in their actions the same is not reflected, blindly writing them is of no good either(Bharwani & Jauhari,2013)
Importance of customer feedback: Customer feedback goes a long way in understand what the customer feels after receiving the service, this feedback helps the company grow and make a better job the next time. Customer also feels valued when his feedback is taken in a constructive manner and not just weighed on criticality (Maity & Das, 2014)
Staying on top of the problems: Being honest about how they can help any customer and are very transparent with whatever they are doing in solving problem of the customers goes down a long way in creating customer success factor.
The misery, grief and the trauma I faced with Tiffany store was an example of a bad customer service encounter; I can never ever think of the ordeal I faced ever in my life, it was by far the most embarrassing and worst customer service I received. Some of the factors which should be avoided to stay away from negative encounter are:
Not believing in the customer’s claim: This thing hurts the most, if the company does not believe or even try to believe what the customer is saying and just thinks of him as a fraud who is trying to take the company for toss, it hurts the sentiments of customer and it goes down as bad service encounter
Being rude and unapologetic: It is a human tendency to apologize if somebody is disturbed, no matter if it’s their fault or not, but it still is the right thing to do. Being rude to the customer’s concern and on top of it being unapologetic about the same leads to customer dissatisfaction resulting in bad service encounter
Absence of empathy towards the customer’s trouble: Empathy is when a person tries to understand a problem by imagining him in the shoes of customer, only then he is able to understand the concern of the customer. In absence of empathy the purpose is lost and at the same time the service rep can never understand what the customer is going through further leading to bad service encounter
Poor/ bad or no communication: It is a proven fact that one of the strong reasons for causing either a good service or a bad service is the communication. Communication is one single force which binds the customer and the service reps, irrespective of the fact that the problem will get resolved or not, if the customer is in loop and is being communicated about what is happening on the account or on his problems, he feels relaxed and develops faith in the company. This hence establishes a positive relationship between the customer and the company irrespective of the fact that problem is solved or not.
Conclusion
Services are Intangible, inseparable, have heterogeneity and perishable in nature, thus in order to tap the intangible components a great amount of effort has to be put in by the customer service reps. An important concept which comes into the picture of service quality is Moment of truth, it can be understood as any episode during which a customer comes in contact with experiencing some service which puts an impression on him, it is extremely important to make a very good first impression on the customer. A person selects a service provider on the basis of availability, convenience, dependability, personalization of service, price, quality, reputation and service speed; every organization should take care of all these elements while ensuring great service quality. The RATER model: Reliability, assurance, tangibility, empathy and responsiveness are the 5 most important attributes to measure service quality; it is highly advised for every company to use the RATER model for its service quality.
References
Bharwani, S., & Jauhari, V. (2013). An exploratory study of competencies required to co-create memorable customer experiences in the hospitality industry. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 25(6), 823-843.
Constantinides, E., Schepers, L., & Vries, S. D. (2015). B2C social media value gap-model: a study of the Dutch online retailing. International journal of electronic marketing and retailing, 6(3), 179-193.
Dixit, A. (2014). Measuring service quality in Railway hospitals using the” GAP” model: a study of west central railway(Doctoral dissertation, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore).
Harpaz, G., & Heimann, G. (2016). Sixty Years of EU-Israeli Trade Relations: The Expectations-Delivery Gap. Journal of World Trade, 50(3), 447-474.
Jain, D. (2015). COMPARISON OF DOMINO’S AND PIZZA HUT USING GAP MODEL OF SERVQUAL IN JAMMU: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS. International Journal of Retailing & Rural Business Perspectives, 3(1), 771-779.
Jennings, G. (2016). UNEP global NMT policy gap analysis: introduction and preliminary findings. Southern African Transport Conference.
Loureiro, S. M. C. (2014). The role of the rural tourism experience economy in place attachment and behavioral intentions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 40, 1-9.
Maity, M., & Dass, M. (2014). Consumer decision-making across modern and traditional channels: E-commerce, m-commerce, in-store. Decision Support Systems, 61, 34-46.
Nguyen, B. T. (2015). APPLICATION OF GAP MODEL IN THE RESEARCH OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRAINING SERVICE IN HANOI (Doctoral dissertation, University of the West of England, Bristol).
Orel, F. D., & Kara, A. (2014). Supermarket self-checkout service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty: Empirical evidence from an emerging market. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(2), 118-129.
Sigit, H., Suharyono, A. D., & Imam, S. (2015). The effects of service quality on customer satisfaction, customer delight, Trust, Repurchase Intention, and Word of Mouth. European Journal of Businessand Management, 7(12), 36-48.
Skålén, P. (2015). MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL IN SERVICE FIRMS: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN ORGANIZATION STUDIES AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT. Business Development: Outsourcing, Teamwork and Business Management.: Key’s for Exponential Growth, 31.
Storti, C., 2015. Speaking of India: Revised Edition: Bridging the Communication Gap When Working with Indians. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Wong, I. A. (2013). Exploring customer equity and the role of service experience in the casino service encounter. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 32, 91-101.
Zurich, L. B. (2017). Service Operations and Management
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