1. Employees Role in service Delivery
Managing People in Service Organizations
Employees Role in service Delivery

2. Service Performance Gap Service Designs and Standards
Provider Gap 3
CUSTOMER
Service Delivery
COMPANY
Service Performance Gap
Customer-Driven
Service Designs and Standards
Part 5 Opener

3. What Are Appropriate Roles for People and Technology?
How do employees’ attitudes, appearances, and performances affect our success?
How do we select, train, and motivate customer contact employees?
Is technology a key strategic thrust in our business or just another operations tool?
How would new technologies impact productivity and/or service quality?
Do customers have the skills and desire to use self service options?

4. Service Employees Who are they? What are these jobs like?
“boundary spanners”
What are these jobs like?
emotional labor
many sources of potential conflict
person/role
organization/client
interclient
quality/productivity tradeoffs

5. Service Employees They are the service
They are the firm in the customer’s eyes
They are marketers
Employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are linked
Quality service is highly dependent on recruiting, training, and retaining employees who can deliver and will deliver excellent service.

6. Service Culture
“A culture where an appreciation for good service exists, and where giving good service to internal as well as ultimate, external customers, is considered a natural way of life and one of the most important norms by everyone in the organization.”
Christian Gronroos (1990)

7. Empowerment
Empowerment means giving employees the desire, skills, tools, and authority to serve the customer.

8. Empowerment and Enablement
Giving employees greater discretion to act without seeking supervisor approval
Training them to use their own judgment in:
solving service problems
responding to customer needs, concerns
customizing service delivery
Giving workers tools and resources needed

9. Factors Favoring Employee Empowerment
Firm’s strategy is based on competitive differentiation and on personalized, customized service
Emphasis on long relationships vs. one-time transactions
Use of complex and non-routine technologies
Environment is unpredictable, contains surprises
Managers are comfortable letting employees work independently for benefit of firm and customers
Employees seek to deepen skills, are good at group processes

10. Empowerment Benefits: Drawbacks:
quicker responses to customer needs during service delivery
quicker responses to dissatisfied customers during service recovery
employees feel better about their jobs and themselves
employees tend to interact with warmth/enthusiasm
empowered employees are a great source of ideas
great word-of-mouth advertising from customers
Drawbacks:
potentially greater dollar investment in selection and training
higher labor costs
potentially slower or inconsistent service delivery
may violate customers’ perceptions of fair play
employees may “give away the store” or make bad decisions

11. Emotional labor is….
the type of labor that goes beyond physical or mental skills, drawing on employees’ feelings and inner emotions.

12. Emotional Labor is … Showing sincere interest. Delivering smiles.
Making eye contact.
Engaging in friendly conversation with people who are essentially strangers.
Suppressing true feelings at the moment.

13. Emotional Labor
“The act of expressing socially desired emotions during service transactions” (Hochschild, The Managed Heart)
Problem: employees may not feel such emotions
Three approaches used by employees
surface acting
deep acting
spontaneous response
Performing emotional labor in response to society’s or management’s display rules can be stressful
Good HR practice emphasizes selective recruitment, training, counseling, strategies to alleviate stress

14. Think about a jobs you have had
Think about a jobs you have had? Was emotional labor a major part of the job?

15. Levels of Employee Involvement
Suggestion involvement
employee recommendations
Job involvement
jobs redesigned
employees retrained
supervisors facilitate
High involvement
information is shared
employees skilled in teamwork, problem solving, business ops.
participate in decisions
profit sharing, stock ownership

16. FISH Philosophy
             
One drizzly day in a small fish market on the West Coast, a group of workers muddled through their jobs of chopping and selling fish.  Suddenly, there was a revelation:  If they had to show up and do these somewhat mundane tasks anyway,  why not HAVE FUN?     The employees of the fish market started to change their attitudes.  It became common to see fish flying across the bins of the kiosk.    Shoppers were brought into the act, and were prompted  to catch the fish being thrown across the room.  Businessmen from the commercial buildings across the street began to come during their lunch hours just to watch the spirit of play being such a success in the workplace.       Eventually, the workers of the fish market developed an entire philosophy about work, which involves the following rules:
Have Fun
Choose Your Attitude
Make Someone's Day
Be There

17. Front – Line Employees Boundary Spanning Roles
External Environment
Internal Environment

18. Boundary-Spanning Workers Juggle Many Issues
Person versus role
Organization versus client
Client versus client
Quality vs production

19. Sources of Conflict for Boundary-Spanning Workers
Person vs. Role
Employees feel that they must suppress their own personalities, or values to effectively perform their jobs.
Organization vs. Client
Employees are faced with conflicting needs of the organization vs. the customer.
Client vs. Client
These conflicts occur when the employee is serving multiple customers with conflicting needs – may not be able to satisfy everyone.
Quality vs. Productivity
Employees are asked to provide high quality and be efficient.

20. Reflect on your own role as a front-line service provider
Reflect on your own role as a front-line service provider. Have you experienced any of these types of conflicts?
person/role
organization/client
inter-client
quality/productivity

21. Recruitment
The right people are a firm’s most important asset: take a focused, marketing-like approach to recruitment
Clarify what must be hired versus what can be taught
Clarify nature of the working environment, corporate values and style, in addition to job specs
Ensure candidates have/can obtain needed qualifications
Evaluate candidate’s fit with firm’s culture and values
Fit personalities, styles, energies to the appropriate jobs

22. Human Resource Strategies for Closing Service Gaps
Hire for Service Competencies and Service Inclination
Compete for
the Best
People
Be the Preferred Employer
Measure and Reward Strong Service Providers
Train for Technical and Interactive Skills
Hire the
Right People
Customer-
oriented Service Delivery
Develop
People to
Deliver
Service
Quality
Treat Employees as Customers
Retain the
Best
People
Empower Employees
Include Employees in the Company’s Vision
Provide
Needed Support
Systems
Promote Teamwork
Develop Service-
oriented Internal Processes
Measure Internal Service Quality
Provide Supportive Technology and Equipment

23. The Cycle of Success Low customer turnover Repeat emphasis on
customer loyalty and
retention
Customer
loyalty
Higher
profit
margins
Broadened
Lowered turnover,
job designs
high service quality
Continuity in
relationship with
Train, empower frontline
personnel to control quality
customer
Employee satisfaction,
positive service attitude c l e C y e e o y
Above average
Extensive m p l
wages E
training
High customer
Intensified
satisfaction
selection effort c l e y m e r C t o C u s
Source: Schlesinger and Heskett

24. * reliability * assurance * tangibles * empathy * responsiveness
Select a service provider with whom you are familiar and discuss ways this person could positively influence the five dimensions of service quality in the context of delivering his or her services.
* reliability
* assurance * tangibles
* empathy * responsiveness

25. The Services Marketing Triangle
Company
(Management)
Internal Marketing
External Marketing
“Enabling the promise”
“Making the promise”
Employees
Customers
Interactive Marketing
“Delivering the promise”
Source: Adapted from Mary Jo Bitner, Christian Gronroos, and Philip Kotler

26. Services Marketing Triangle Applications Exercise
Focus on a service organization. Who occupies each of the three points of the triangle?
How is each type of marketing being carried out currently?
Are the three sides of the triangle well aligned?
Are there specific challenges or barriers in any of the three areas?

27. Ways to Use the Services Marketing Triangle
Overall Strategic Assessment
How is the service organization doing on all three sides of the triangle?
Where are the weaknesses?
What are the strengths?
Specific Service Implementation
What is being promoted and by whom?
How will it be delivered and by whom?
Are the supporting systems in place to deliver the promised service?

28. The Service Profit Chain
Source: An exhibit from J. L. Heskett, T. O. Jones, W. E. Sasser, Jr., and L. A. Schlesinger, “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 1994, p. 166.

29. Traditional Organizational Chart
Manager
Supervisor
Supervisor
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Customers

30. Customer-Focused Organizational Chart
Customers
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Front-line Employee
Supervisor
Supervisor
Manager