Transcript Services

Service Processes
Operations Management
Dr. Ron Lembke
How are Services Different?
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Everyone is an expert on services
What works well for one service provider doesn’t
necessarily carry over to another
Quality of work is not quality of service
“Service package” consists of tangible and intangible
components
Services are experienced, goods are consumed
Mgmt of service involves mktg, personnel
Service encounters mail, phone, F2F
Degree of Customer Contact
More customer contact, harder to
standardize and control
 Customer influences:
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Time of demand
 Exact nature of service
 Quality (or perceived quality) of service
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3 Approaches
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Which is Best?
Production Line
 Self-Service
 Personal attention
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What do People Want?
Amount of friendliness and helpfulness
 Speed and convenience of delivery
 Price of the service
 Variety of services
 Quality of tangible goods involved
 Unique skills required to provide service
 Level of customization
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Service-System Design Matrix
Degree of customer/server contact
High
Buffered
core (none)
Permeable
system (some)
Reactive
system (much)
Low
Face-to-face
total
customization
Face-to-face
loose specs
Sales
Opportunity
Face-to-face
tight specs
Internet &
on-site
Mail contact technology
Low
Production
Efficiency
Phone
Contact
High
Applying Behavioral Science
The end is more important to the lasting
impression (Colonoscopy)
 Segment pleasure, but combine pain
 Let the customer control the process
 Follow norms & rituals
 Compensation for failures: fix bad
product, apologize for bad service
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Restaurant Tipping
Normal
Experiment
Introduce self(Sun brunch) 15%
23%
Smiling (alone in bar)
20%
48%
 Waitress
28%
33%
 Waiter (upscale lunch)
21%
18%
“…staffing wait positions is among the most
important tasks restaurant managers
perform.”
Fail-Safing
“poka-yokes” – Japanese for “avoid
mistakes”
 Not possible to do things the wrong way
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Indented trays for surgeons
 ATMs beep so you don’t forget your card
 Pagers at restaurants for when table ready
 Airplane bathroom locks turn on lights
 Height bars at amusement parks
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How Much Capacity Do We
Need?
Blueprinting
Fancy word for making a flow chart
“line of visibility” separates what customers
can see from what they can’t
Flow chart “back office” and “front office”
activities separately.
Demand rate varies by time
35
#
customers
arriving
per hour
Arrivals
30
Average
25
20
15
10
5
0
9
10
11
12
1
2
Time of Day
Demand varies by Customer
Time
3
Min to
process
customer
Average
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Customer #
What did we learn?
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Human considerations very important in
services
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Hard to please everyone, because we’re all
critics
Degree of customer contact important
strategic decision
 Keeping things simple is good
 Fluctuations in demand making capacity
setting difficult
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