INTRODUCTION
Customer service is the provision of service to customer before, during and after a purchase. Customer service defined as a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction such as the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation. Besides, customer service may be provided by a person such like sales and service representative or by automated means called self-service. Example of self-service is Internet sites where consumers can choose and make purchase themselves without any help from the staff of the company or websites. Besides, customer service not only gives customer to have a good experience but also give them an experience that exceeds their expectations. There are three important keys to achieve a good customer service. The first key is that knowing the products or services that you are providing to the customers. It is okay to say “ I don’t know” but it should always be followed up by “ but let me find out” or “ give me a minute I check it for you”. No matter in what situations¼Œbe sure that your customers are not be leave with an unanswered question. Then the second key is the body language or communication
There are 5 basic needs of customer. Please list and explain in details those needs
INTRODUCTION OF QUESTION 1
Satisfaction is a fulfillment of one’s wishes, expectations, or needs. Customer satisfaction is a measurement of how products and services supplied by a company that meet or surpass customer expectation. This customer satisfaction are hard to achieve because there are many factors including friendly employees, courteous employees, knowledgeable employees, helpful employees, accuracy of billing, billing timeliness, competitive pricing, service quality, good value, billing clarity and quickly service. These are the factors that affecting the satisfaction of the customer. By fulfilling the customer satisfaction, a company can gain revenue as much as 2. 6 times of the company revenue. Therefore, customer satisfaction is one of the key to success in the business. Besides, customer satisfaction also seen as a key that differentiator and increasingly has become a key element of business strategy in a competitive marketplace. The customer service can be defined as the overall feeling of contentment with a customer interaction. In order to achieve the satisfaction of the customers, the first thing to do to the customer is to fulfill their basic needs towards the company.
ANSWER OF QUESTION 1
Customer needs can be define as what customers want and need by the service department. Nowadays, customers are keep on changing very day therefore every organizations or company must ensure that their current level of customer service is appropriately meets their current customers’ needs. In order to achieve the good customer service, companies should create good strategies that can fulfill the current needs of the customers. The employees should have the ability to make decisions to benefit their customers. Besides, a good manager leads to the good employees because the guidance of the managers affects the performance of the employees. Moreover, the managers should be the one who can hire the right people to do the jobs and employees who are well trained to anticipate the challenges that are appearing daily in the service time.
Good customer service, not only great attitude are needed, but as well as the right attitude at the right time and right place. Some people might become over focused on trying to provide excellent customer service to the customer that they had lose the sight of the little things that the customer would appreciate. By using the technology and the current information, the customer service will be done in more excellent and easier. Moreover, technology and information must work together in order to enhance customer service. The challenge of providing an excellent customer service never ends. Therefore, individual must always give themselves exam or challenges in their performance to ensure that they are in the in the positive skills practice that can provide the customer service in enjoyable and efficient situation. If we are always in the busy situation or having additional stress in our lives, this might cause the old behaviors to come back to us. Therefore, we must keep on examine ourselves to prevent this situation. Not only the employees have their job in keeping excellent customer service, management department also must always measure the customer satisfaction. The measuring should be asking customer questions about what had being done well and any other suggestion for the company to improved. Sometimes customer may have no complained but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have any complaints or suggestions toward the service that we provide. One of the best ways to become a better customer is to make ourselves into the customer sides. This means that we exercise our rights as customers. By doing that, we will become more sensitive and aware of what the customer needs from us. By standing at the customer sides, we can feel what the customer really needs and it can lead us to become an excellent customer service provider. Write out the compliment and complaint letters to share your experiences and opinions. Besides, fill the comment cards and answer truthfully when someone asks how your experience was. An individual can learn more things from the opinions than other people shared. Every customer has a different need in customer service. There are mostly five basic needs of every customer and in different situation, customer will have different needs. These 5 basic needs are service, price, quality, action and appreciation
Appreciation
Action
Quality
Price
Service
5 Basic Needs
Firstly is the service, or can say as an action that given to a customer that can enhance the customer experience. Customers always expect that the service that was given by the service provider is appropriate for the level of the purchase that they are making. There are two level of purchase that can be made by customer. There are the shorter purchasing level and the longer purchasing level. Shorter purchasing level is that the business that come in sudden or can say it as spontaneous. While the longer purchasing level is that business that had been programmed and planned in a period of time before it is being follow up.
Example for the shorter purchasing level is like a group of customers that walk in a restaurant to have a birthday celebration and request for a room for their birthday party. In this kind of situation, the restaurant staffs have to rush to set up a room for the customer. In this case, the staff will feel stressed and might not their job well as usual. However, if the customers call in or walk in to make a reservation, the staff would have more time to prepare for the birthday party which could be one of the examples of the longer level of purchasing. If customer is going on the longer purchasing level, the restaurant staff will have more time to do their preparation and also feel no stress. In that case, the staff can provide the better service to the customer. Meanwhile, some little mistakes can be forgiven in the shorter purchasing level case because the restaurant was not given enough time for the preparation unlike the longer level of purchase which has more time for the preparation. Eventually, if the customers choose the longer purchasing level, they will get a better service than choosing the shorter purchasing level.
The second needs for the customer is the price, which can be defined as the financial resources. Each customer has different perceptions on how they value the price of the product whether the product is cheap, reasonable or expensive. Some customer might not be affordable for such an expensive product so companies should set the price according to the customers of the environment to ensure that the price they set can be afford by the customers. When talk about prices, the quality is other factor to be considered by the customer before buying any product. Quality, the third need in the basic needs of a customer, is the standard of something when it is compared to other things like it; how good or bad that something is. In other way, quality is a type of measurement or consideration by the customer on how much they can use it and how useful it is to the customer, the durability and functionality. Some customer are quality-minded therefore these customers willing to pay as much as the service or product cost in order to get the qualified and excellent product or service. These customers will not care so much of the price as long as the qualities that they wanted are there.
Example for these two needs, a customer has the authority to choose one out of two sport shoes. One of the sports shoes cost about RM50 while the other one cost about RM200. Of course the more expensive shoe is more durable because the raw materials that use to make the shoe are much more better than the cheaper shoe. Mostly customer rather spend more money to get the better sport shoe because they can wear it for few years more than the cheaper one. Therefore, how much you pay, you will get what you pay for it.
Then, the fourth out of the five basic needs is action and it can be defined as the facts or process of doing something by people. Every customer needs an action from the service provider when there are problems or questions arise. Therefore, many companies provide free-toll customer assistance telephone lines, flexible return policies, and customer carryout services in response to the need for action. Then, the customer services should have an immediacy of respond when there are problems occur. By showing immediacy to the customers, they will understand the situation of the problems and will accept or wait for their problem to be solved. Besides, the feedback or can be say action that made by the customers. Feedbacks by customers are very important because it can allow the companies to improve their weakness in the way of providing customer service. Besides, these feedbacks also can let the customer service to know how to create a better idea to attract customer in order to achieve the expectation of the customers.
Example for the action needs, a customer buys a motorbike helmet from a bike accessories shop. Then the customer realize that the size of the helmet not suitable for him or her. Besides, the customer also feel that the color of the helmet not matching his or her motorbike so the customers take back the helmet back shop to exchange another new. The shop staff follow the shop policy by checking the receipt to ensure that the time when the helmet that purchased by the customer is not more than 7days. If the period of the purchase more than 7days, the staff should immediately find the upper level of the shop before doing or making promises any request from the customer. Therefore, the staff should inform the customer so the customer won’t feel being left out.
As for the last needs out of the five basic needs for the customers is the appreciation. Appreciation can be defined as the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of someone or something. By appreciating customer, an organization or the companies can make their customers feel more welcome and happy. To maintain the revenue from the customer, the appreciation should be done in proper manner. There are many ways to convey this appreciation to the customers. For example, saying greeting like welcome or goodbye to the customers when they walk in or walk out. Besides, saying thank you to them will let feel that happy. Then, saying sorry to them when the customer providers did something incorrectly or wrongly to the customers. Although appreciates are easy to do but not easy to understand by customer, therefore the service provider should always show to their customer that they are being appreciated. Besides, this appreciation also can fulfill the satisfaction of the customer. Eventually, when the customer feel appreciated and happy with it, they will always buy products or get their services. This situation can be called as the long term business.
CONCLUSION FOR QUESTION 1
The answers above are what a customer service provider has to do to achieve excellent customer service and the five basic needs such as service, price, quality, action and appreciation of the customers. By fulfilling these basic needs of the customer, the organization or companies can make higher profit in their business. In order to fulfill these five basic needs, the attitude of an individual of the service provider and customer are very important. Besides, the service provider should have professional working skills or the other sentence, do not put any emotional during the working time.
QUESTION 2
All customers have their own unique sets of expectations. Expectations may be positive or negative. Organizations must periodically attempt to determine what their customers expect from their customer experience. In a group, list and explain in details the top five expectations that customers would have of the following organizations.
5 star hotel
International Fast Food Chain
Travel and tours company
INTRODUCTION FOR QUESTION 2
Level of Expectation
Basic Expectation
Secondary Expectation Expectation is something that is strongly belief and wanted in the future. For customers’ expectation, there are few value that they will always concern about. These values are the money and effective or on other way as an efficient services by the service provider. Other than that, the customers also expect certain intangible things during the service time. Expectation can be in either in positive way or negative way. The positive expectation is the expectation or satisfaction that the customer wanted for products or services. Moreover, the negative expectation is a failure or disappointments that done by the service provider to the customer and this may causes the dissatisfaction feeling occurs in the customer heart. Besides, expectation can be divided in two levels, the basic expectation and secondary expectation.
Basic expectation is the most basic things that needed by the customer. It is the basic requirements of interaction between the customer and the service provider. Then secondary expectation is a much more higher expectation from the customer. The customer will based on the previous experience and will always expect that the service provider will provider back the same quality or a better quality of service.
ANSWER OF QUESTION 2
There are seven common things which is the expectation of the customer and making the customer keep on doing business with you or your organization.
Patience
Empathy
Enthusiastic Service
Professionalism
Timely Service
Courtesy
Personal Recognition
7 Common Expectations From Customer
The personal recognition is a way of the service provider to give recognition by giving a smile or greeting to the customers to ensure that they are here. It is better to lead the customer to a seat when they are still waiting for the service. Then, courtesy is pleasantries such as ‘ please’ and ‘ thank you’ from the service provider to the customer. The service provider should always be polite to the customer even they are not right. Besides, timely service means that giving the customer the faster yet effective service to the customer. As a service provider, we must always ensure customers are not waiting for a long to be served. In additional, mostly of the customer expect to get a knowledge answer from the service provider for their question. Therefore, service provider should have better training and knowledge in order to fulfill customer expectation or to achieve customer satisfaction. Moreover, the customers visit your company or organization is to satisfy their needs. Therefore, the service provider should always ready a service professional’s team to serve the customer when they come to visit the companies and this is call enthusiastic service. Then, empathy, as a service provider it is important to understand and provide appropriate service to the customer. In order to achieve this, service provider should be able to put themselves in the customers’ needs position or look as much as possible. Finally, patience is an important thing in customer service. Customers will not feel any anger or dissatisfy.
There are many grade of hotel in the hotel industry. Different hotel has the different rank of expectation. The expectations in the 5 grade or 5 star hotels are much more higher than other grade hotel. The customers that visit the 5star hotel expect an excellent service from the hotel because they paid more. The diagram below is the top five expectation of the customer towards to the 5star hotel
Excellent Service
Facilities in the Room
Quality of the Food
Friendly
Cleanliness
Top 5 Expectations of 5 Star Hotels
Firstly, the cleanliness of the hotels is very important because it is one of the factors for keeping the customer to stay in the hotel. When the areas of the hotels are clean, it can present a harmony and comfortable feeling to the customers. Secondly, the attitude of the hotel staffs. The hotel staffs should be friendly to customers in order to let the customers to know that they are welcome. Then, the quality of the food should have a standard level in the hotel line. To maintain the constant quality of the food, the hotel should have a qualified or well-trained chef to in charge the kitchen. In additional, the facilities in the room should be complete. The meaning of complete is that the room should have television set, refrigerator, cupboard, curtain, and suitable furniture. Finally, is the customer service that given by the hotel staffs. In 5 star hotels, they should provide excellent service such as providing a 24hours service, on-time service, professional service and efficient service.
Nowadays, many people go to fast food stall such as McDonald, KFC, Burger King, A&W, and others because these fast food stalls can serve their food to customer in a short period of time. Therefore, customers that visit the fast food stall or in other name called international fast food chain have certain expectation. The diagram below is the top five expectations for the international fast food chain.
Cleanliness
Additional Service (FOC)
Comfortable Environment
Good Service and Attitude
Guaranteed Time
Top 5 Expectations of International Fast Food Chain
Firstly, the guaranteed time means that the foods that had been order by the customer are served in a time that had been told to the customers. For example, customer ordered a pizza and it will be serve within 20minutes time and the kitchen must ensure that the pizza is served within 20minutes. The fast foods are fast yet the qualities of the food are still there. Secondly, the attitude of the staff must be good and always giving a good smile to the customers. Besides, the service also must be good in order to keep the customer coming back again to the shop. Then, the cleanliness of the restaurant should be in the high level which means that the staff should maintain or ensure that the restaurant is clean everyday. In additional, the fast food restaurant should provide other additional service and totally free of charge. Those additional services are internet access (WiFi), soft drinks refill, reading corner (newspapers and magazines) and television. Finally, when the facilities of the restaurant are complete, it will create a comfortable environment for the customers. Therefore, the comfortable environment is what the customers expect the most among the 5 top expectations of the international fast food chain.
Top5 Expectations of Travel and Tours Company
Flexibility of the Trip
Reasonable Price
Knowledgeable Staff
Excellent Service
Friendly and ResponsibilityFor the travel and tours company, the five expectation of the customer are shown in the diagram below.
Firstly, the reasonable price means that the package that offered by the touring or travel company are worth that price for going to the certain location. Besides, it also includes some special offer to the customer so the customer can have more choices and it also can attract other customers. Secondly, excellent service is like the service of the company staff and the attitude during the conversation with the customers. Besides, the vehicle fleet of tour driver should ensure that their customers are satisfied with their performances. Then, the friendly and responsibility staffs are very important to customers. Especially the tour guide must be friendly because the customer can feel that they are welcome and won’t feel bored. Besides, the tour guide also must be responsible during the whole trip to ensure the customers are safe. In additional, the tour guide should have the local knowledge regarding to the place that the customer visits. Therefore, the company should hire more knowledgeable staff in order to make their customers know the history of the place. Finally, the tour or travel company should make the trip more flexible or can says as the flexibility of the trip so customer will be more relax and not in the hurry during the whole trip.
CONCLUSION FOR QUESTION 2
The overall of this question is to show the expectation of the customer towards the 5star hotel, international fast food chain, and travel or tour company. Besides, the customer expectations should be continuously evolving and improving. For hotels, try to get back feedback or comment cards from customer direct to improve their service. Then for international fast food chain, providing better food and services therefore customers will always return back to the shop. Finally for the travel or tour companies, providing more packages or promotion to the customer in order to attract them back to the companies.
CONCLUSION (GENERAL)
Customer service is whatever things that the customer provider do for the customer in order to enhances a better experience of the customer. Besides, customers also have their own expectation or perception towards the company or restaurant. Therefore, the service provider should have excellent service to the customer to achieve customers’ satisfaction. Customer service is important for every business because customer come back to your company if the service is excellent.
