Retailers want to ensure that their customers are satisfied with the quality of service they provide. A satisfied customer is far more likely to be a loyal customer after all. But what determines whether a customer is going to be satisfied with a retailer’s service quality? We have to have some way of measuring the expectations a customer has for a service against the actual quality of service that a retailer provides.
To do this, we can perform what’s called a Gap Analysis. Customers have expectations for service quality and service providers usually try to understand what those expectations are. But sometimes management’s perception of what those expectations are can be a bit off.
This creates the knowledge gap. The retailer lacks the knowledge necessary about the customer to truly understand the customer’s expectations of service quality.
So how does management close this knowledge gap as much as possible to best understand the customer expectations?
- Do market research – Interview your customers, do a survey. You can’t understand the customer without hearing directly from them.
- Connect management to customers and frontline employees – Provide opportunities for them to interact.
- Try to understand customer expectations more deeply. For example, if you’re a doctor you might expect your patients to want a highly credentialed doctor who provides excellent health outcomes. Yes, that might be true, but the customer (or patient) might also want a clean waiting room, better hours of operation, online health records, and automated prescription services. Unless you do your research, you might never know these things.
When the service provider knows what the customer’s expectations are (or at least they think they know) then they have to create standards of service based these perceptions. But sometimes the standards that are created don’t exactly meet all of the expectations that management has identified.
This is the standards gap. Minimizing the standards gap is about fully utilizing the knowledge you have about customers and their expectations and ensuring that all of this knowledge is used to formulate the standards of service that you establish.
How can we do this:
- Put systems in place that ensure that research is disseminated throughout the organization
- Make understanding service standards a part of all employee training.
When the best standards have been set (or at least to management’s best ability or perception), then the service provider should provide service at that level of standard. Oftentimes, that can fail to happen.
This is when we get the delivery gap. The actual service delivered does not match the standards that the firm has set.
How can we overcome this:
- Empower employees – give employees the power to reach the required standard of service for regardless of customer or context.
- Provide support and incentives to employees – reward them for meeting the service standard management has set
- Use technology – the effective use of technology can ensure that service delivery is more standardized.
Finally, as a firm, we want to make sure that the customer is aware of our services and the level at which we can provide them. We typically engage in marketing communications to achieve this. But what happens when our marketing communications doesn’t match the service we actually deliver? This is called the communications gap.
Think of it this way. You may not have ever stayed in a five-star hotel, but you probably have a pretty good idea of the level of service those five-stars requires. You have these expectations because of the communications from that hotel about the level of service you as a visitor should expect. If you subsequently stay at the hotel and don’t experience that expected level of service, there’s a communications gap.
There are a number of ways we can address the communications gap.
- Promise only what you know you can deliver – overpromising and underdelivering is the fastest way to create unsatisfied customers. Make sure that you know what you can deliver and communicate that, or even underpromise, and then deliver to the best of your ability.
- Treat all communications as part of one integrated campaign.
- Make policies and procedures consistent across all locations – no location should be doing its own thing.
To recap. A gap analysis lets service providers understand where the provided quality of service fails to meet the customer’s expected quality of service. If we add each of these gaps together, we arrive at an overall “service gap”. So to eliminate this service gap, we must close the knowledge, standards, delivery, and communications gaps.