Chapter 3: Customer expectations Flashcards
Zone of Tolerance
The extent to which customers recognize and are willing to accept this variation.
Personal Needs
What customers desire in service. Personal needs can fall into many categories, including physical, social, psychological and functional.
Lasting Service Intensifiers
Are individual, stable factors that lead the customer to a heightened sensitivity to service. One of the most important of these factors can be called derived service expectations, which occur when customer expectations are driven by another person or group of people.
Temporary Service Intensifiers
Consists of short-term, individual factors that make a customer more aware of the need for service.
Perceived Service Alternatives
Are other providers from whom the customer can obtain service. If customers have multiple service providers to choose from, or if they can provide the service for themselves (such as lawn care or personal grooming), their levels of adequate service are higher than those of customers who believe it is not possible to get better service elsewhere.
Customer Self-perceived Service Role
We define this as customer perceptions of the degree to which customers exert an influence on the level of service they receive. In other words, customers’ expectations are partly shaped by how well they believe they are performing their own roles in service delivery.
Situational Factors
Defined as service performance conditions that customers view as beyond the control of the service provider. E.g. floods or storms
Predicted Service
The level of service that customers believe they are likely to get. This type of service expectation can be viewed as predictions made by customers about what is likely to happen during an impending transaction or exchange.
Explicit Service Promises
Are personal and non-personal statements about the service made by the organization to customers. - The statements are personal when they are communicated by salespeople or service or repair personnel;
- they are non-personal when they come from advertising, brochures and other written publications.
Explicit service promises are one of the few influences on expectations that are completely in the control of the service provider.
Implicit Service Promises
Are service-related cues other than explicit promises that lead to inferences about what the service should and will be like. These quality cues are dominated by price and the tangibles associated with the service. In general, the higher the price and the more impressive the tangibles, the more a customer will expect from the service.
Exceeding Customer Expectations
Some observers recommend deliberately under-promising the service to increase the likelihood of meeting or exceeding customer expectations. While under-promising makes service expectations more realistic, thereby narrowing the gap between expectations and perceptions, it may also reduce the competitive appeal of the offer.
