Service Industry Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Service Industry Management - Essay Example Considering the views of physical nature of activities for products, it is easier to define product rather than the services. Services generally embrace a huge diversity of activities and involve many intangible inputs and outputs. The services may be treated as an economic activity that creates value and provides benefits by bringing about a desired change in or on behalf of the recipient of the service. Services have in general four characteristics which have the potential to have impact on marketing program. These four characteristics are Intangibility, inseparability, Heterogeneity and variability. All services often include important tangible elements. Useful way to distinguish between goods and services was first suggested by Lynn Shostack (1977). In the absence of significant tangible elements, marketers may find it useful to employ physical images and metaphors to demonstrate the competencies of the service firm and to illustrate the benefits resulting from service delivery. Services are delivered in real time. In that sense, service providers become an integral part of services. So services are inseparable because they are produced and consumed at the same time unlike goods. Service marketers need to understand customers' time constraints and priorities (lovelock and Wright, 2002). People can be part of the service itself and this can be advantage of services marketers. Many services require customers to participate in creating the service product. For most of the service customers can be thought of as partial employees, and services firms have much gain from trying to train customers to make them more competent and productive (Canziani, 1997). Basically the services offerings are unique in nature and it only exists ones and so never exactly repeated. So services firms need to devote special care to selecting, training and motivating those employees who will be serving customers directly. In addition to possessing the technical skills required by the j ob, these employees also need to possess good interpersonal skills. Service marketers need to think carefully about whether it is a good idea to mix several segments together in the same service facility. This is how heterogeneity in variability could be dealt with. Finally, service is a deed or performance it is ephemeral transitory and perishable and so cannot usually be stocked in inventory after being produced. Although facilities, equipment and labor can be held in readiness to create the service these elements simply represent productive capacity, not the product itself. If there is no demand during a given time period unused capacity is wasted. Apart from these above four characteristics perhaps the key distinction between goods and services lies in the fact that customers usually drive value from services without obtaining ownership of any tangible elements. The marketing strategy defines what should happen and why. It has been argued that a combination of appropriate/inappr opriate strategy and good/poor implementation will lead to various business outcomes (Jobber and Fahy, 2006). The marketing mix is not a theory of management that has been derived from scientific analysis, but a conceptual framework which highlights the principal decisions that marketing manager's make in configuring their offerings to suit customers' needs. The tools can be used to develop both long term strategies and