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Keywords
Service quality assurance, Customer satisfaction, Customer services quality
Abstract
Some organisations are becoming more concerned with delighting their customers than simply satisfying them. Yet despite an extensive literature on service quality and satisfaction little has been written about service excellence and how organisations can achieve delighted customers. The purpose of this exploratory but empirically based paper is to provide a definition of service excellence to help marketers and managers, where appropriate, design and deliver it. This paper is based on over 400 statements of excellent and poor service gathered from around 150 respondents. After categorising them, using a grounded theory approach, it is suggested that service excellence is about being "easy to do business with". This has four key elements: delivering the promise, providing a personal touch, going the extra mile and resolving problems well. Further analysis of the frequencies of mention revealed the overarching importance of dealing well with problems and queries.
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Introduction
Service excellence is both obtrusive and elusive. We know when we have received it and, rather more frequently, we know when we have not. Such service, both excellent and poor, has a strong emotional impact upon us as customers, creating intense feelings about the organisation, its staff and its services, and influencing our loyalty to it. Yet many organisations seem to find service excellence elusive, hard to grasp, and also difficult to deliver. Paradoxically, we, as individuals, instinctively know what it is and how simple it can be.
The research on which this paper is based is part of a five-year study into service excellence commissioned by the Institute of Customer Service. Its purpose is to try to bridge this gap in management thinking by trying to develop a better understanding of service excellence and suggesting how to achieve it. This exploratory and initial paper makes an attempt to understand what is meant by the term "service excellence" as a first step towards helping marketers and managers, where appropriate, to design and deliver it.
Service excellence
It has been suggested that, in the past, many organisations have been satisfied with simply appeasing...