Services & Service Quality

Definition

Services relate to companies that offer the provision of a service to their customers, rather than a physical product. For example, banks, telecommunications providers, energy supplies, internet providers, hairdressers, lawyers and so on.

Perceptions of the quality of service and customer satisfaction are often considered important metrics for companies that provide service to customers.

Key Findings

A common alternative to measuring customer evaluations of service is to directly measure actual service delivery: how quickly calls were answered, were specific actions undertaken.
It is not possible to generalise that all services possess the characteristic differences between services and products. Services are often characterised as being distinct from products (but not always and not exclusively, as certain products are sometimes as well) in being: intangible, perishable, inseparable (often the production, distribution and consumption take place simultaneously) and heterogenous.

Best Practice

Marketing a service is essentially the same process as marketing physical products. Both require an understanding of customer needs and buying behaviour and require the building of mental and physical availability.

Reports (4)

Reports

Showing 4 results

Distinctive Assets at your service?
Understanding Distinctive Brand Assets in Service Categories

Report 125
November 2023

We investigate how operating within service categories affects Distinctive Asset building. We find 88% of assets used by service brands fall into existing asset type classifications developed for packaged goods brands. The remaining 12% of assets have not been previously documented and we describe them as: Access assets, Promotion asset, App Icons. We identify the service brand asset types with the highest brand ownership, and the types with the most competition in memory.

Report 119
July 2023

In service sectors, customers (in this context, users) can choose from a range of channels to access their providers, for example through websites, mobile applications, or brick-and-mortar branches. Providing access point options for customers requires sizeable investment by the service provider. This report aims to encourage evidence-based channel management decisions and provides some foundational documentation of how customers use channels in a service category (banking).

Report 101
April 2021

The Institute is often asked if there are situations where some of marketing’s scientific laws do not hold. In this report we look at music. Common sense says that different music strongly appeals to different types of people (e.g., different age, gender). This should violate two empirical laws of brand buying, i.e., that the user profiles of competing brands are very similar, and that brands share consumers with other brands simply in line with brand size/popularity. Good science requires searching for boundary conditions for scientific laws, so we investigate to what extent these empirical marketing laws apply for music listening behaviour.

REPORT 89
June 2018

This report shows the Law of Double Jeopardy for brand loyalty holds for different service categories, such as banking, insurance and hotels, for different loyalty metrics and across different countries.