Marketing - Service Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Marketing - Service Marketing - Essay Example Dividing the various services encounters into two sections of â€Å"satisfying† and â€Å"dissatisfying† experiences, let’s start with the first encounter experience at the Ice Bar in London. Our experience at the Ice Bar in London was average because we were kept waiting for 20 minutes. Once entered in the specified area, we got the feeling of cramped in an overcrowded space without any seating arrangement. Staff strength was minimal to attend to the large crowd although their smiling faces reduced our level of dissatisfaction. The management should add more aesthetic elements to the bar so that it does not remain a one-time visit. Overall, the experience at Ice Bar was disappointing, as it failed on the parameters of prompt service. The queues were long to get entry in the Ice Bar, leading to dissatisfaction. Assaf and Magnini (2012) have conducted statistical analysis of customer satisfaction in hotel efficiency, which indicates that if customer satisfaction i s not given due importance, it can lead to huge difference in the mean and ranking of hotel efficiency scores. Efficiency measures can help a hotel in attaining its objective of providing satisfaction to customers, which is minutely related to planning, organizing, decision-making and information seeking by managers. Customer satisfaction has been used as an output variable in the modelling of hotel efficiency. In the past, critical variable used to be revenue and number of rooms rented out. It is derived from the gathered data of American Customer Satisfaction Index that a firm’s efficiency level among its competitors can be affected if customer satisfaction as an indicator is excluded from the modelling. This fact is proved in the case of Wyndham Hotel and Resorts, which stood on the fourth rank out of eight competitors in an efficiency model that did not include customer satisfaction data but came on seventh number when the model included satisfaction as an output. The con cept that customer satisfaction can have a great impact in efficiency modelling has robust theoretical underpinnings in the marketing literature. It derives that satisfaction has a powerful connection with loyalty, which transforms into reduction in the cost of future dealings, diminishes price elasticity, builds a service failure stock, and cuts down on the negative publicity through word-of-mouth (Assaf and Magnini, 2012). The study by Assaf and Magnini (2012) can help hotel businesses to decide drivers of efficiency by analyzing both inputs and outputs of the model, the inputs being the number of outlets, number of full time employees, and operational expenses while customer satisfaction, income, and occupancy rate are taken as outputs. On the lines of Hotel Marriot, other hotels should organize cross-training of their employees to reduce a model input such as staff strength and boost the output in the form of customer satisfaction. It proves the effectiveness of efficiency model at managerial level, focusing on the capacity of a hotel firm to cross-train to enhance customer satisfaction level besides other outputs such as income and occupancy rates. Writing on my dissatisfying experiences, the transportation encounter with the EasyJet was not satisfying because the personnel at the airport were not fully informed about situations and their handling. Additional time was wasted unnecessarily. Seats were small and uncomfortable.