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Informationen zum Autor Leonard L. Berry holds the JCPenney Chair of Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University, where he is also Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Retailing Studies. Klappentext Excellent service is the foundation for services marketing, contend Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman in this companion volume to "Delivering Quality Service." Building on eight years of research, the authors develop a model for understanding the relationship between quality and marketing in services and offer dozens of practical insights into ways to improve services marketing. They argue that superior service cannot be manufactured in a factory, packaged, and delivered intact to customers. Though an innovative service concept may give a company an initial edge, superior quality is vital to sustaining success.Berry and Parasuraman show that inspired leadership, a customer-minded corporate culture, an excellent service-system design, and effective use of technology and information are crucial to superior service quality and services marketing. When a company's service is excellent, customers are more likely to perceive value in transactions, spread favorable word-of-mouth impressions, and respond positively to employee-cross-selling efforts. The authors point out that a service company that does relatively little pre-sales marketing but is truly dedicated to delivering excellent quality service will have greater marketing effectiveness, higher customer retention, and more sales to existing customers than a company that emphasizes pre-sale marketing but falls short during actual service delivery. The focus of any company, they insist, must be customer satisfaction through integration of service quality throughout the entire system.Filled with examples, stories, and insights from senior executives, Berry and Parasuraman's new framework for effective marketing services contains thekey to high-performance services marketing. Chapter 1 Services and Quality A guest at the Holiday Inn on Union Square in San Francisco is attempting to turn on the radio in his room. No matter which button he pushes the radio will not play. Finally, the guest reports a defective radio. A hotel employee soon arrives at the guest's room with a new radio, a box of chocolates, and flowers. As for the radio already in the room, the employee turns it on without difficulty (it plays perfectly) and quickly reassures the guest that the radio is tricky to operate. The server shows the guest how to work the radio and pleasantly exits the room, leaving both radios, the chocolates, and the flowers. An elderly woman is in her favorite food store, Ukrop's Super Markets of Richmond, Virginia. She picks up a large pineapple from the display case, holds it for several moments, and then returns it with obvious reluctance. Ukrop's president, James Ukrop, witnesses this scene and asks the customer if she would like to buy half of the pineapple, indicating that the store would be glad to cut it in half. The customer accepts and states how she looks forward to visiting Ukrop's because the staff is so friendly and makes her feel so welcome. The manager of the downtown Chicago Marriott hotel discovers that two thirds of all guest calls to housekeeping are requests for ironing boards. This discovery leads to the idea of placing irons and ironing boards in each guest room. The problem is where to find the $20,000 this will cost. The hotel manager reviews the capital budget and notes that $22,000 is earmarked to replace black-and-white television sets with color sets in the bathrooms of concierge-level guest rooms. The manager inquires how many VIP guests have requested color television sets for their bathrooms and learns that no guest has ever made such a request. So the manager cancels plans to buy color sets and adds the irons and ironing boards. The result is no net addition to the capital budget, a big produ...
