Employees Roles in

Service Delivery

Lecture # 10

OUTLINE
Service Culture
The Critical Importance of Service
Employees
Boundary Spanning Roles
Strategies for Delivering Service
Quality
Through People
Customer Oriented Service
Delivery

Service Culture
Service Culture: Service Culture has

been defined more informally as the

way we do things around here.
Experts have suggested that a customer
oriented organization will have at its
heart the service culture, and where
giving good service to internal as well as
external customers is considered a
natural way of life and one of the
most important norm (rule) practised
by everyone.

Service Culture
Exhibiting Service Leadership:
A strong service culture begins with
leaders in the organization who
demonstrate a passion (strong desire) for
service excellence. Leadership does not
consist of giving a set of commands from
a thick rulebook but, rather the regular
and consistent demonstration of ones
values.
Employees are more likely to
embrace a service culture when
they see management living out

Service Culture
Developing a Service Culture:
A service culture cannot be developed
overnight, there is no magic to maintain
service culture. Hundred of little but
significant factors are required to build
and maintain a service culture.

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
The Critical Importance of Service
Employees:
Frontline employees and those
supporting from behind the scenes are
critical to the success of any service
organization.
The key focus in this chapter is on
customer contact employees because:

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
They are the service.
They are the organization.
They are the brand.
They are marketers.
In many cases, the contact employees is
the service, for example, in most
personal and professional services (like
haircutting, physical trainers, child care,
cleaning & maintenance, limousine
services, and legal services)

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
the contact employee provides the entire
service singlehandedly.
Thus investing in the employee to
improve the service is equal to
making a direct investment in the
improvement of a manufactured
product.
Even if the contact employee doesnt
perform the service entirely, he or she
may still represent the firm in the
customers eye.

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
The Service Triangle: Services marketing
is about promises, promises made,
and promises kept. A strategic
framework known as the service triangle
(illustrated in Figure 12.2) visually
highlight the importance of people in
the firms to keep their promises and
succeed in building customer
relationship.

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
Figure 12.2
The Services
Marketing
Triangle

Company /
Management
Internal Marketing
Enabling the
promise

Employee

External Marketing
Making the
promise

Interactive
marketing
Delivering the
promise

Customer

The Critical Importance of Service

Employees
Employee Satisfaction, Customer
Satisfaction, and Profit: Satisfied
employees make for satisfied customers,
and satisfied customers can in turn
strengthen employees sense of
satisfaction in their jobs. Some
researchers suggests that unless service
employees are happy in their jobs
customer satisfaction will be difficult. In
stores with the highest customer
satisfaction, employee turnover

The Critical Importance of Service Employees

was 54%, whereas in stores with the lowest customer
satisfaction, turnover was 83%. Other research
suggests that employees who feel they are treated
fairly by their organization will treat customers better,
resulting in greater customer satisfaction.
Figure 12.3 the service profit
chain

Interna
l
service
quality

Employe
e
Satisfac
tion

Employe
e
retentio
n

Revenue
growth
External
service
value

Employe
e
productiv
ity

Custome
r
satisfact
ion

Custome
r loyalty

Profitabi
lity

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
Boundary Spanning Roles: The frontline
service employees are referred to as
boundary spanners because they
operate at the organization boundary.
They provide a link between the external
customer and internal operations of the
organization. They serve a critical
function in understanding, and
interpreting information to and from the
organization to the external world.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
Who are these boundary spanners?
What type of people and positions
include boundary spanner roles?
In industries such as fast food, hotels,
telecommunication, and retail, the
boundary spanners are the least skilled,
and lowest paid employees in the
organization.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
They are order takers, front desk
employees, telephone operators, store
clerks, truck drivers and delivery people.
In other industries boundary spanners
are well paid, highly educated
professionals
for example, doctors, lawyers,
accountants, consultants & architects
etc.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
No matter what the level of skill or pay,
boundary spanning position are often
high-stress jobs.
In addition to mental and physical skills,
these position require extraordinary
levels of emotional labour.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
Emotional Labour: It means delivering
smiles, making eye contact, showing
sincere interest, and engaging in friendly
conversation with people who are more
or less strangers who may or may not
ever be seen again. Friendliness,
courtesy, and responsiveness directed
towards customers all require huge
amounts of emotional labour from the
frontline employees.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
Emotional labour attracts peoples
feelings (often requiring them to
hide their true feelings) to be
effective in their jobs.
Sources of Conflict: Frontline employees
often face interpersonal conflicts on the
job. Their frustration can, if left
unattended, lead to stress, job
dissatisfaction and weaken ability to
serve customers, and burnout soon.

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
Organizational/Client Conflict: A more
common type of conflict for frontline
service employees is the conflict
between their two bosses, the
organization and the individual
customer. When customer makes
excessive demands, the employee has to
choose weather to follow the rules or
satisfy the demands. The conflict is
greatest when the employee believes
the organization is wrong in its policies

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
and must decide weather to
accommodate the client and risk losing a
job, or to follow the policies. These
conflicts are especially severe when
service employee depend directly on the
customer for income in the shape of tips
or commission.
Quality/ Productivity Trade-Offs: Frontline
service workers are asked to be both
effective and efficient: They are
expected

The Critical Importance of

Service Employees
to deliver satisfying service to customers
and at the same time to be cost
effective and productive. A physician
for example is expected to deliver caring
quality service to the patients but at the
same time to serve a certain number of
patients within a specified time frame.
Research suggests that these trade
offs are more challenging in service
business than for manufacturing
business.

Strategies for Delivering Service

Quality Through People
Strategies for Delivering Service
Quality Through People : The
strategies presented here are organized
around four basic themes. To build a
customer-oriented service minded
workforce an organization must:
Hire the right people
Develop people to deliver service
quality
Provide the needed support
systems

Strategies for Delivering Service Quality Through People

Figure 12.6
Human Resource strategies for delivering service quality
through people
Hire for
Be
th
service
pre e
Compete competencie e ferr
d
for the s
e
mp
M
Train fo
best
r
yer lo
re eas
technica
st wa urepeople
Hire
the
an
l&
se ron rd
right
d
interact
pe rvi g
i
people
rf ce
Custo
Devel ve s
or
kills
m
op
mer
er
Empowe
s
Retai
peopl
r
Orient
Treat
e
mployee
n
the
e
to
Employees
ed
s
best
delive
as
Servic
r
customers peopl
e
e
servic P
rom
s
e
e
o
Provide
d ee
t
e
u
am te
l oy
c
w
qualit
M
needed
k
or
In pl the y`s
ea
iy
m
n
D
support
n
e in a
e
se te su
se velosystem
in mp
q
Provide u rv rn re
r
co sion or vice psupportiv
al i c e al
i
i
e
it
v
int nte
y
e
e
d
pr rna
oc
technolog
es l
s
y and
equipmen
t

Strategies for Delivering Service

Quality Through People
Hire the right people: To effectively
deliver service quality considerable
attention should be focussed on hiring
and recruiting service personnel.
Compete for the best: To get the best
people, an organization needs to identify
them and compete other organizations
to hire them. It is suggested that firm act
as marketers in their hunt of the best
employees. Just as they use their

Strategies for Delivering Service

Quality Through People
marketing expertise to compete for
customers.
Be a Preferred Employer: One way to
attract the best people is to be known as
the preferred employer in the particular
industry or location. Other strategies
that support to be a preferred employer
include extensive training, career and
advancement opportunities,

Strategies for Delivering Service

Quality Through People
excellent internal support, attractive
incentives and salary, and good quality
of services that employee are proud to
be associated with.

Strategies for Delivering Service

Quality Through People
Retain the Best People: Employees
turnover, especially when the best
service employees are the once leaving
can be very injurious to customer
satisfaction, employees morale and
overall service quality. Some firms spend
a lot of time attracting employees but
then tend to take them for granted,
causing these good employees to search
for job alternatives.

Customer-Oriented Service
Delivery
Customer-Oriented Service Delivery:
Firms that have a strong service culture
clearly put an emphasis on the customer
and the experience, and also the contact
employee because this person is the
most responsible for ensuring that the
customers experience is delivered as
designed. Historically many firms have
viewed senior management as the most
important people in the firm.

Customer-Oriented Service
Delivery
Figure 12.7, places management at top
of the structure the customer at the
bottom, with customer contact employee
just above them. If the organizations
most important people are customers,
they should be at the top of the chart,
followed by those with whom they have
contact. Such a view, illustrated in Figure
12.8 is more relevant with the customer
oriented focus.

Customer-Oriented Service Delivery

Figure 12.7 Traditional
Organization Chart

Manager

Supervi
sor
Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Supervi
sor
Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Front-

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

line
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Customers
Customers
Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Frontline
employe
e

Supervi
sor
Figure 12.8 Customer
Focused
Organization Chart

Supervi
sor
Manager

Thank You
Always Seek Help
of Allah Almighty