Delivering Quality Service by Valarie A. Zeithaml (English) Paperback Book

Description: Delivering Quality Service by Valarie A. Zeithaml Synopsis coming soon....... FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customers perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customers need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery.For example, Florida Power & Light has developed a sophisticated, computer-based lightening tracking system to anticipate where weather-related service interruptions might occur and strategically position crews at these locations to quicken recovery response time. Offering a service that customers expect to be available at all times and that they will miss only when the lights go out, FPL focuses its energies on matching customer perceptions with potential need. Deluxe Corporation, Americas highly successful check printer, regularly exceeds its customers expectations by shipping nearly 95% of all orders by the day after the orders were received. Deluxe even put U.S. Postal Service stations inside its plants to speed up delivery time. Author Biography Valarie A. Zeithaml is associate professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. The recipient of three distinguished teaching awards, Dr. Zeithaml has written articles for the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Retailing. Table of Contents CONTENTSPREFACE1. Service Leadership Spells Profits2. The Customers View of Service Quality3. Potential Causes of Service-Quality Shortfalls4. Gap 1: Not Knowing What Customers Expect5. Gap 2: The Wrong Service-Quality Standards6. Gap 3: The Service Performance Gap7. Gap 4: When Promises Do Not Match Delivery8. Getting Started on the Service-Quality Journey9. Service-Quality Challenges for the 1990sAppendix A. Servqual and Its ApplicationsAppendix B. Approaches for Measuring Service-Provider Gaps and Their CausesNotes and ReferencesIndex Review Christopher H. Lovelock Visiting Senior Lecturer, Sloan School of Management, MIT No one has done more than this energetic trio to insist that service quality must be defined from a customer-driven perspective. The research findings described in this book yield a practical, commonsense structure to help managers close the gaps that separate customers from the quality service experiences they seek.David B. Luther Senior Vice President, Corporate Director -- Quality, Corning Incorporated In this pathbreaking book, the authors have taken the little-understood notion of service quality and broken it down into very well-defined, manageable increments that are tightly linked to customer perceptions. Everyone concerned with quality, in any form, needs to read and understand "Delivering Quality Service."George J. Stasick Manager of Customer Services & Customer Relations, J.C. Penney Company, Inc. In my opinion, "Delivering Quality Service" will be a best seller. It will certainly be must reading for retailers in the 1990s.Joel D. Raphael Director, AT&T Communications "Delivering Quality Service" should be required reading for anyone in a service business.Roger J. Dow Vice President, Sales and Marketing Services, Marriott Corporation Finally, a "real world" approach to improving service quality which provides a framework for action and a road map for success. "Delivering Quality Service" will be a landmark work as we tackle the biggest challenge of the 1990s.Thomas R. Elsman Strategic Planning Manager, Customer Service Division, E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company The beauty of "Delivering Quality Service" is that not only do the authors break new ground in service quality and improvement, but the cumulative benefits of their work will serve as a step-by-step handbook. Review Quote Thomas R. Elsman Strategic Planning Manager, Customer Service Division, E.I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company The beauty ofDelivering Quality Serviceis that not only do the authors break new ground in service quality and improvement, but the cumulative benefits of their work will serve as a step-by-step handbook. Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 SERVICE LEADERSHIP SPELLS PROFITS Service quality is a central issue in America today. In a recent Gallup survey, executives ranked the improvement of service and tangible product quality as the single most critical challenge facing U.S. business. One reason service quality has become such an important issue is that Americas economy has become a service economy. Services account for approximately three-fourths of the gross national product and nine out of ten new jobs the economy creates. As David Birch writes: It used to be that we were good at growing things. We still are, but with virtually no people involved. Agricultural employment has gone from well over half of all jobs to about 2% of them. It used to be that we were good at making things. We still are, but with very few people involved....Today, only 9% of American workers actually labor in factories. Yet, we have created millions of jobs....Its not surprising that what these people are doing instead of making things is providing services. Virtually all organizations compete to some degree on the basis of service. It is difficult to name even one industry for which service matters are unimportant. Study the strategies of manufacturing companies such as Ford Motor Company or Corning Glass Works and what you find is a paramount role for service. Indeed, as the decade of the 1990s unfolds, more and more executives in manufacturing firms will be as keenly interested in service quality as executives in banking, health-care, and transportation businesses are today. As manufacturing executives find it increasingly difficult to establish sustainable, technology-based competitive advantages, they will direct added attention and resources to value-added service as a truer source of superiority. And as manufacturers compete more on service, there will be less distinction between manufacturing and service businesses. Services are also crucial to Americas future as a worldwide competitor. The U.S. government is counting on significant growth in net service exports in the 1990s to play a key role in addressing the countrys balance of trade problems. And yet, Americas net positive trade balance in services fell steadily throughout the 1980s, prompting some observers to suggest that the United States is on the verge of taking the same international beating in services that it has already endured in manufacturing. The principal culprit is seen as mediocre service quality. As Quinn and Gagnon write: It will take hard and dedicated work not to dissipate our broadbased lead in services, as we did in manufacturing. Many of the same causes of lost position are beginning to appear. Daily we encounter the same inattention to quality, emphasis on scale economies rather than customers concerns, and short-term financial orientation that earlier injured manufacturing. The central role for services in the American economy is a key factor behind service qualitys rising prominence as an institutional and societal issue. Services are so much a part of what we produce, consume, and export in this nation that it would be surprising if we werent concerned about quality. A second factor behind service qualitys rising prominence is that superior quality is proving to be a winning competitive strategy. McDonalds. Federal Express. Nordstrom. American Airlines. American Express. L. L. Bean. Dominos Pizza. Disney World. Club Med. Deluxe Corporation. Marriott. IBM. In every nook and cranny of the service economy, the leading companies are obsessed with service excellence. They use service to be different; they use service to increase productivity; they use service to earn the customers loyalty; they use service to fan positive word-of-mouth advertising; they use service to seek some shelter from price competition. Service excellence pays off richly for reasons we develop in more detail later in this chapter. With service excellence, everyone wins. Customers win. Employees win. Management wins. Stockholders win. Communities win. The country wins. THE URGENT NEED FOR SERVICE LEADERSHIP How do we explain the incongruity that service excellence pays off and yet is in such short supply? The signs of indifferent, careless, and incompetent service in America are everywhere. In a national banking study, three out of ten consumers recall a service problem at their current or former financial institution, typically an error of one kind or another. More than half of those recalling problems deemed them serious enough to switch financial institutions or to close accounts. In an Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution survey of readers, 91 percent of the respondents said that quality of service had declined over the previous 20 years. Wrote one reader: "The animals are running the zoo." Time magazine recently devoted a cover story to the service problem, claiming that "Personal service has become a maddeningly rare commodity in the American marketplace." The Wall Street Journal, in a story about health-care service, stated: "The problems are manifold: Bad diagnoses. Unnecessary surgery. Over prescribing or misrepresenting drugs. High rates of hospital infection. Lab-test errors. Faulty medical devices. Alcoholic or drug-addicted doctors." Lowell Levin of Yale Universitys medical school advises surgery patients to use a magic marker to indicate just where on their bodies the surgery is to be done, claiming his advice wouldnt sound ridiculous if people only knew how often mistakes do occur. Stanley Marcus, retired chairman of Neiman-Marcus, admonishes specialty and department store retailers for forgetting their sales-service heritage. Marcus writes: Poor selling saved me $48,373 in 1983. That year, I decided I would not buy anything I didnt need unless someone sold it to me. Whenever I found something I wanted, but didnt encounter sales persuasiveness, I did not buy. By the end of the year, my savings total was $48,373. MANAGING IS NOT ENOUGH The research that we present in this book documents the central role that leadership plays in delivering excellent service. We have seen firsthand how strong management commitment to service quality energizes and stimulates an organization to improved service performance. We have seen firsthand how role ambiguity, poor teamwork, and other negatives fester in a rudderless, leaderless environment, sapping an organizations service quality. True service leadership builds a climate for excellence that prevails over operational complexities, external market pressures, or any other impediments to quality service that might exist. Mediocre service in America is common, but it is not a given. In every single industry we have examples of companies delivering superb service. Excellent service is not a pipe dream; it is possible to overcome the conditions that foster service mediocrity. The key is genuine service leadership at all levels of an organization -- leadership that offers the direction and inspiration to sustain committed servers. Managing is not enough. Service work can be difficult and demoralizing. Customers can be rude. Company policies can be suffocating. Sheer numbers of customers to serve can be overwhelming. End-of-the-day fatigue can be desensitizing. Over time many service employees get "beat up" by the service role and become less effective with customers even as they gain technical experience that should produce the opposite result. Listen to psychologist James Carr as he describes how a novel he read about the circus made him recognize the transformation he himself underwent in service roles: It was not the story line...that left its mark on me. It was the description of the social atmosphere through which the characters moved. All who lived under the big top -- the freaks, the acrobats, even the animals -- were real to each other. Everyone else -- specifically anyone in the audience -- was a "flatty." ...I recalled how I had despaired, during a brief stint as a ticket agent during World War II, over the futility of trying to give individual attention to the masses of rail travelers clamoring to get somewhere...and I remembered the irritation I had felt when the crowds became unmanageable at several counter jobs I had held in my youth. There had been times when it seemed the only salvation was to retreat from involvement with individuals and to devote my attention exclusively to the specifics of the job at hand. When I did this, the customers became two-dimensional nonentities without personality or feelings....At the time I had not referred to them as flatties but oh how descriptive was the term when I encountered it....Even though I had treated people that way -- often considering it businesslike -- I realized that I had always resented being treated as a flatty! Few of us, like Carr, wish to be treated as a flatty by service providers. Few service providers, again like Carr, begin a new job treating customers in this way. Robotlike service traits almost always develop on the job. People in service work need a vision in which they can believe, an achievement culture that challenges them to be the best they can be, a sense of team that nurtures and supports them, and role models that show them the way. This is the stuff of leadership. In their book, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge, Bennis and Nanus point out that the principal distinction between leaders and managers is that leaders emphasize the emotional and spiritual resources of an o Details ISBN1439167281 Author Valarie A. Zeithaml Short Title DELIVERING QUALITY SERVICE Language English ISBN-10 1439167281 ISBN-13 9781439167281 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 658.812 Year 2009 Country of Publication United States Illustrations black & white illustrations Pages 240 Imprint The Free Press Place of Publication New York UK Release Date 2009-03-25 NZ Release Date 2009-03-25 US Release Date 2009-03-25 Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication Date 2009-03-25 Audience General AU Release Date 2009-03-31 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:22885755;

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