Designing and Managing Services

DESIGNING AND MANAGING
SERVICES
Pranab Kishor Choudhary

CONTENTS
Designing Service Process
Fail-Proofing Service Process
Setting Service Standards
Consumer perception and
Emotions
Service Process Redesign
Self Service Technologies
Customer Participation in Service
Process
Managing Customer’s Reluctance
to change

SERVICE PROCESSES
Are the service experience from the customer’s perspective.
Are the architecture of service from the firm’s perspective

DESIGNING SERVICE PROCESS
The first step is to document or describe it.
Flowcharting and Blueprinting are two key tools that we use for
documenting.

FLOWCHARTING
Maps a service process
Shows the nature and sequence of steps involved
Is an easy way to visualize the customer experience
Makes
Reservation
Check In
Spend
Night in
Room
Breakfast Checkout
Maid makes
up room
Breakfast
Prepared

BLUEPRINTING
A more complex form of flowcharting.
Shows how a service process is constructed
Maps the customer, employee, and service system interactions
Details pre-process, in-process, and post-process stages of service
delivery

THREE-ACT PERFORMANCE
Pre-Process
Initiation of Service Process
In-Process
Core Service is being delivered.
Post-Process
Necessary activities for closing of the service encounter happens
Differentiation is important.
Customers have different sensitivities in each stage.

Customer
Actions
Employee
on
stage
action
Contact
Back
Stage
Action
Support
Process Calls for
reservati
on
Arriv
e at
Hotel
Park
The
Vehicl
e
Gives
bag to
the
Attenda
nt
Chec
k In
Go to
Roo
m
Reciev
es Bag
Sleep
/
Showe
r
Calls
Room
Service
Reciev
es
Food
Eat
Check
Out
Accepts
Reservation
Greet &
Takes Bag
Check In
Process
Delivers
Bag
Deliver
Food
Checkout
Process
Line of
Interaction
Line of
Visibility
Line of Internal
Interaction
Check
Availability,
Insert
Booking
Take Bag to
the room
Take Food
Order
Registration
System
Prepare
Food
F
F
F
F
W
W
W W

BLUEPRINTING
Design elements:
Front-stage activities
Physical evidence
Line of visibility
Backstage activities
Support processes and supplies
Potential fail points
Common customer waits
Service standards and targets

FAIL-PROOFING THE SERVICE
PROCESSES
Failure or delay in accessing the core service.
Fail points can be identified in blueprint.
Fail points are to be considered from the customer’s perspective.

APPLICATION OF POKA-YOKES
The term poka-yoke is derived from the Japanese words “poka”
(inadvertent errors) and “yokeru” (to prevent
poka-yokes ensure that service employees do things correctly, as
asked, in the right order and at the right speed.
Collecting Data on problem
Analysing the root cause
Establishing preventive solutions

Failure
Customer Arrival Unnoticed
Exchange of bags of customer
Problem in calling room service
Waiting for food
Food Quality
Poka-yoke
Use a Bell chain to signal arrival
Number the bags of customer
according to their room number
Plant an efficient calling system
Send a message to customer
when food is ready
Take feedback from customer
through monitor screen attached
in their rooms

SETTING SERVICE STANDARDS
AND TARGETS
Identify which service and process attributes are important to
customers.
These attributes should be the basis for setting standards.
Standards can be:
Time Parameters
Technically correct performance
Prescription for appropriate method/style
Standards should be objectively measurable.
“What is not measured in not managed”

CONSUMER PERCEPTION AND
EMOTIONS IN SERVICE DESIGN

Ultimately, only one thing really matters in
service encounters — the customer’s
perceptions of what occurred
Richard B. Chase and
Sriram Dasu,
Professors at University of
Southern California

CONSUMER PERCEPTION AND
EMOTIONS IN SERVICE DESIGN
Start Strong
Build an Improving Trend
Create Peak
Get bad experiences over with early
Segment Pleasure, Combine Pain
Finish Strong

SERVICE PROCESS REDESIGN
Signs for need of redesign
Lot of information exchange b/w customer and service units
A high ratio of checking or control activities to value adding activities
Increased processing of exception
Growing number of customer complaints about inconvenient and
unnecessary procedure.

Service process redesign should achieve following objectives
Reduce number of service failures
Reduce cycle time
Enhanced productivity
Increased Customer Satisfaction
All four objective should be achieved simultaneously

Service process redesign includes
Examining the service blueprint with key stakeholders
Eliminating non value adding steps
Addressing Bottlenecks in the process
Shifting to self service

SELF SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES
(SST)
Ultimate form of customer involvement.
Customer’s time and efforts replaces those of a service employee.
Customers even provide their own terminals.
Expensive face to face contact with employees is replaced by SSTs.
Peer to Peer problem solving.

SELF SERVICE TICKETING
MACHINE

ASSESSING & IMPROVING SSTS
Does the SSTs work reliably ?
SSTs should be simple and efficient.
Is the SST better than the inter-personal alternative ?
IRCTC, Amazon online book store, etc.
Are there system in place to recover the service if the SST fails?
CSR on IVR menu, Attendants at supermarket, etc.

CUSTOMER PARTICIPATION IN
SERVICE PROCESS
Service redesign’s efficiency and productivity often depends upon
customers involvement.
Customer Participation is physical, mental or emotional inputs by
consumer.
Customer are Co-Creator of service process.
“Customers cause about one-third of all service problems”
Tax, S.S., Colgate, M., & Bowen, D.E. (2006). How to prevent your customers from
failing.

PREVENTING CUSTOMER FAILURES
Poka-yokes designed for customers.
Observe, Identify and Redesign
Customer involvement in the process
Use Technology
Manage Customer behavior
Encourage customer citizenship
Improve services cape

MANAGING CUSTOMER’S
RELUCTANCE TO CHANGE
To increase customer participation or to shift to SSTs customer
behavior should changed.
Prepare customer using marketing communication.
1. Develop Customer Trust
2. Understand customers habits and expectations
3. Pre-test new procedures and equipment's
4. Publicize the benefits
5. Teach customers to use innovations and promote trials.
6. Monitor performance and continue to seek improvements.

Designing and Managing Services

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