Customer satisfaction through service designing

Service Blue Printing Methodology

Service blue printing is a technique that helps us to design our services to maximize customer service, or customer satisfaction. To understand the concept, let us first look at the Customer Satisfaction aspect of services from theoretical perspective.

The SERVQUAL methodology

Service Quality (SERVQUAL) is a model and a methodology that is used to describe the elements of the quality of service to facilitate customer satisfaction. While there is no agreement of one method to describe and measure the service quality, the SERVQUAL is identified as the vastly used method for describing and measuring the quality of service organizations.

Service Quality is identified with following attributes;

1.       Tangibles – Physical facilities, equipment and appearance of personnel in the service provision. Mainly those who come in contact with the customers, when it comes to providing the service as well as the physical evidences that come in to play.

2.       Reliability – Ability to perform the promised service dependability and accurately. This is mainly dependent on the process effectiveness and training provided to the employees on the service standards determined by the organization.

3.       Responsiveness – Willingness to help customer and provide prompt service. This will be determined by the process efficiencies and level of training among the staff interacts with the customer. “On stage” and “Back Stage” performance of employees will contribute towards this element.

4.       Empathy – Caring and individualized attention that the firm provides to its customers. The ambiance and the layout of the service environment, and employee attitude will contribute towards this element.

Level of above elements can be used to measure the quality of service, of organizations. Example of such measurement is shown in the chart above. This is a result of measuring the service quality of a Sri Lanka service organization. This chart basically shows the customer satisfaction of the organization.

Understanding the Customer Satisfaction

The customer satisfaction and how organization could cater for a higher level of customer satisfaction is described in the “Gaps Model” of service quality. There are two models of Service Quality Gaps Model, identified as 5 Gaps Model and 7 Gaps Model. For the simplicity, we shall look at the five Gaps Model of the service quality gap.

Gap 1 – Gap between what customers expect and organizations understanding of what customers expect, which is the management perception

Gap 2 – Management perceptions versus service specifications, which is a management decision of how the service is designed to serve the customers

Gap 3 – Service specification versus service delivery, this gap is created by either employees not being competent enough to perform the service standards setup by the company, or company not training employees in order to perform the service standards set by the organization

Gap 4 – Service delivery versus external communication, where the organization including the employees should communicate the level of service provided. This may be achieved by the physical settings, employee uniforms and postures and gestures of employees and response time of service performance

Gap 5 – Overall Service Quality Gap, which is the gap in the customer’s perception of what customers perceived as could be expected from the organization, and the perception gained by the customer after consuming the service. This is caused as cumulative results of Gap 1, Gap 2, Gap 3
and Gap 4. This concept is illustrated in the diagram above.

Above highlights the requirement of organizing the organizations process, organizational structure and physical evidences associated with the service provision of the organization in order to provide a good Customer Service, and to minimize the service quality gap. The Service Blue Printing is used as a tool to determine or design the best service process within the organization, to serve customers.

Service Blue Print

Objective of the Service Blue Print is to identify the process that Customer performs during the time that customer consumes the service, and organize the entire organization to provide a service that would facilitate the customer’s process, so the achievement of customer satisfaction would be the ultimate result.

Service Blue Print will look at the Customer Process during the time of customer consuming the service. If there are different modes of customer interaction with the organization, each will be identified separately for the purpose of analysis. Upon identifying the Customer Process, elements which have a direct interaction with the Customers will be mapped to serve the customer process as “on stage” processes. “Back Stage” Processes will be identified beyond the point of interaction with the customers, and support processes as well will be laid down to complete the service provision to customer process. This will be developed to a graphical representation of “bird’s eye” view of the organizations’ facilitation for the customer process. This overall view will help an analyst to identify failure points in the overall system.

Finally all the physical evidences as well will be identified and in-depth analysis can be performed to identify how best the physical evidences should be organized to facilitate customer process.

Service Blue Print will help the organization to cater for the all the five elements of SERVQUAL model, and partial facilitation of Service Quality Gap as well.