Asignación de parentesco y contribuciones

Only a small portion or partly less important part of service processes are autonomous because of the integration of the customer into service production.

Consequently, autonomous processes in most cases do not create value by themselves. For example, the preparation of a salad by a restaurant’s chef itself does not create value for the firm. The definition of a well-designed investment product of a bank and intensive communications to market this product do not create value for the bank. In contrast, these activities could even be said to destroy value because they induce cost exclusively. Only when the customer is involved, i.e. when the customer pays for and eats the salad and when bank customers purchase the investment product, do revenues occur and the service providers create value.

Therefore, the so-called primary processes of the Service Value Chain – as the processes that directly create value – concern processes where the customer is involved. As indicated by the restaurant and banking examples above, value for the firm is created when the customer purchases a service, pays a price and consequently the service is produced by more or less intensive customer interactions, such as ordering the salad, being served, getting the bill. In these interactions, there is a ‘throughput’ of the customer which creates value for the customer and for the firm. Consequently, one group of primary processes is combined within the interaction process between service provider and customer.

In most service industries, interaction processes vary with increasing

relationship duration between provider and customer. When the customer hasn’t used a service before, the service provider first must entice this customer to use the service. The first contacts are affected by little customer knowledge about the provider and vice versa. The customer does not know the provider’s services, e.g.

PART 2

the menu of the restaurant, and processes: how long it takes to get the bill after asking for it. Vice versa, the provider does not know the specific customer needs yet (which dressing the customer likes for the salad). This situation changes with further interactions between service customer and provider. When a regular guest of a restaurant orders a salad, the waiter or chef possibly knows which dressing the guest likes. Also, the customer knows the provider, its employees as well as services and becomes an expert in using the provider’s services. Moreover, the customer possibly tries further services of the provider not used yet, resulting in further revenues for the provider. These examples show that value for the customer and for the firm is not only created by the single interaction but also by the linkages between more than one interaction, which when combined constitute a customer relationship. In consequence, next to the interaction process a second group of primary processes concerns the relationship process.

Based on these considerations, the interaction and the relationship process as primary processes of the Service Value Chain are presented in Chapters 3 and 4.

Service capacity management (Chapter 10) Customer acquisitionCustomer retentionCustomer recovery

Relationship process (Chapter 4) Customer integrationService productionService recovery

Interaction process (Chapter 3)

Primary proc esses

(Part 2) Service resources (Chapter 9)

Secondary pr oces

ses

Communicating service value (Chapter 8)

Defining service valueDelivering service value (Chapter 7) Service price (Chapter 6)Service product (Chapter 5)

Managing service

resour ces

(Part 4)

Creating service value

(Part 3)

Services marketing implementation and controlling (Chapter 12)

Services marketing strategy (Chapter 11)

Internal and e xternal servic

es marketing envir onment

(Part 5)

Value orientation of service firms (Chapter 1) Value creation by service firms (Chapter 2)

Basic concept (Part 1)

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Think of any recent contacts you have had with a service provider, buying a sandwich at a kiosk, a drink in your favourite café, drawing money at an ATM or visiting the cinema. What are the things you remember of these service contacts?

Maybe the vendor of the sandwich was especially friendly; the café was crowded which you enjoyed in terms of atmosphere but not that you were unable to get a seat; the ATM did not work in the first place and you had to insert your credit card twice in order to get the money; you enjoyed the film very much – however, right in front of you were a bunch of girls giggling most of the time. Many of the contacts you probably remember concern what is called the interaction with the service provider and/or other participants of the service process.

Thus, service interactions are important to the customer – in many cases even more important than the core service, like the film seen or the fact that you even-tually got money from the ATM.

Therefore, the Service Value Chain puts the service interactions at the centre of value considerations. Service interactions are – next to customer relationships (see Chapter 4) – one of the two primary value processes of a service provider.

Due to the fact that in service situations value is created via the throughput of the customer through the service production process, and this throughput is realised in service interactions, these interactions are one of the major value drivers of a service firm’s value.

As outlined in Chapter 1, the interaction process can be divided into three sub-processes: customer integration, service production and service recovery. First, since a service can only be produced when the service provider and the customer meet, the interaction process needs to be initiated, the customer must bring the car to the garage, the mechanic has to put the car into the right position in order to start the inspection, or, the bank customer needs to come to the bank branch, to the ATM or visit the internet banking website of the bank. In other cases, the ser-vice provider comes to the customer, e.g. the ambulance arriving at an accident site or the babysitter coming to a family’s house.

Once the customer has been integrated and the interaction process has been initiated, the actual service production can take place during the so-called service encounterduring which, in most cases, the service provider conducts activities involving the customer or their objects, e.g. cutting hair, transporting the cus-tomer to the holiday destination, giving the cuscus-tomer a bed during an overnight

The customer interaction process: Managing