This handbook focuses on how to measure customer satisfaction and how to develop transit agency performance measures. It will be of interest to transit managers, market research and customer service personnel, transit planners, and others who need to know about measuring customer satisfaction and developing transit agency performance measures. The handbook provides methods on how to identify, implement, and evaluate customer satisfaction and customer-defined quality service.
Sarah Cook's down-to-earth guide provides the rationale behind measuring service effectiveness and explains the measurement process, from start (preparation) to finish (managing the results).
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 customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customer's 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, America's 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. Customer expectations change over time. To anticipate these changes, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company regularly monitors the expectations and perceptions of their customers, using focus group interviews and the authors' 22-item generic SERVQUAL questionnaire, which is customized by adding questions covering specific aspects of service they wish to track. The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service -- reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles -- goes right to the heart of the tendency to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceived quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.
Good customers expect excellent service. Increasingly, library customers are looking to online services instead of to the library for information. For every library that wants to win satisfied customers and bring those that have strayed back into the library, here are proven tools to assess needs and improve service.
Building on five years of exhaustive research in 14 service industries, the authors demonstrate how one or two companies in each industry constantly set new standards for quality that force competitors to either adapt or fail.
Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.
Unrivaled coverage of a broad spectrum of industrial engineering concepts and applications The Handbook of Industrial Engineering, Third Edition contains a vast array of timely and useful methodologies for achieving increased productivity, quality, and competitiveness and improving the quality of working life in manufacturing and service industries. This astoundingly comprehensive resource also provides a cohesive structure to the discipline of industrial engineering with four major classifications: technology; performance improvement management; management, planning, and design control; and decision-making methods. Completely updated and expanded to reflect nearly a decade of important developments in the field, this Third Edition features a wealth of new information on project management, supply-chain management and logistics, and systems related to service industries. Other important features of this essential reference include: * More than 1,000 helpful tables, graphs, figures, and formulas * Step-by-step descriptions of hundreds of problem-solving methodologies * Hundreds of clear, easy-to-follow application examples * Contributions from 176 accomplished international professionals with diverse training and affiliations * More than 4,000 citations for further reading The Handbook of Industrial Engineering, Third Edition is an immensely useful one-stop resource for industrial engineers and technical support personnel in corporations of any size; continuous process and discrete part manufacturing industries; and all types of service industries, from healthcare to hospitality, from retailing to finance. Of related interest . . . HANDBOOK OF HUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS, Second Edition Edited by Gavriel Salvendy (0-471-11690-4) 2,165 pages 60 chapters "A comprehensive guide that contains practical knowledge and technical background on virtually all aspects of physical, cognitive, and social ergonomics. As such, it can be a valuable source of information for any individual or organization committed to providing competitive, high-quality products and safe, productive work environments."-John F. Smith Jr., Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President, General Motors Corporation (From the Foreword)
This important new work provides a comprehensive discussion of the customer satisfaction evaluation problem. It presents an overview of the existing methodologies as well as the development and implementation of an original multicriteria method dubbed MUSA.
This book is very useful for it is not just ‘descriptive’ in its nature, but ‘prescriptive’, too. It is descriptive in the sense that it describes the process of developing or using a metric in a problem situation, and prescriptive as it clearly prescribes how a beginner can put the theory into practice. In this globalized economy, maintaining quality of products and services has been the thrust area of interest among academicians and practitioners. Today, there are quite a good number of books and research articles available. Nevertheless, service quality measurement has always posed problems, particularly in the context of service industries due to the difficulty in the measurement of the intangibles and implied needs of the customers. The research literature is filled with articles on how to quantify the services, and there are several streams of arguments on the choice of the most ideal approach. However, the research gap lies in the answer to the question: ‘Do these measurement instruments concur in their measurement outcomes or do they give different results in the same situation?’ This book primarily makes an attempt to answer this question through a case study approach. Even though, there are several instruments for the measurement of service quality, the two most widely used instruments are SERVQUAL and SERVPERF metrics. Comprehensively, this book explains the systematic procedure of using both, the instruments in a service sector, and further, the procedure for conducting a statistical analysis so that one will be able to apply the same in any service sector. It then takes the reader through a series of tests in order to compare the two metrics, and to prove statistically if there is the same outcome in a problem situation. The results are sure to surprise the reader, and trigger the “research bent of mind” to undertake a similar study of such metrics and gain mastery over performing an independent research with very minimal guidance from a professional guide. To conclude, this book is sure to provide adequate inputs for a service quality researcher, and answer various questions wriggling in the mind of a beginner of service quality research such as: How shall I start with service quality measurement? How to collect data? How to select a sample? How to conduct a literature review? How to analyse the data? What research methodology is applicable? How to build hypothesis on my research? How to use statistical procedures? How to present the [...]
