Service Quality - What is it?

There is some interesting work being done by Phil Klaus (terminal degree and title unknown) at the Cranfield School of Management in England. He is working on a scale that represents not only the attributes of the customer experience (the reasons why customers choose (or not) to purchase and then weighting them. He defines the customer experience as the sum of the attributes leading to customer purchasing and repurchasing behavior. His research is focused on the financial services industry.

Mr. Klaus believes the whole story of customer purchasing behavior is multi-faceted and complicated. He states that research shows that customer decision cannot be reduced anymore into a simple "functionality versus price" formula. He asserts that purchasing behavior is driven more by the emotional and subconscious elements and less by the functional attributes of products and services.

From this assertion he believes that offering high-quality goods and services alone is not sufficient. He is suggesting that organizations must compete on a more complex level by creating a satisfactory customer experience through all stages of the buying process, managing the customer's expectations and assessments, before, during and after the buying process. The customer experience is a broad, holistic concept that managers find difficult to measure and manage.

At this point I would like to interject that I agree with much of what he is stating. My wife, a psychotherapist, has pointed out to me that most decisions are rationalizations of the underlying emotions. the four basic emotions are happy, sad, mad and afraid. It makes sense that people generally do not make a purchase when they are sad or mad. People more often make a purchase when they are either happy or afraid.

For example, people buy a tv when they are happy. I never see shoppers who are mad or sad looking at tvs. (I must admit there are some personality disorders that buy under other conditions - some are called shopaholics and some are a step beyond where the urge to shop is psychotic). Customers may also make purchases because of some fear. People will purchase excessive amounts of food if they think there will be a food shortage.

Of course, the problem presented by Mr. Klaus is what personality factors that contribute to happy or afraid does one examine. Since each consumer purchase decision is based on an individual, any survey developed must be able to accommodate all personality profiles for the market and how they react when happy or afraid. When the purchase experience is in the B2B market, the emotional and subconscious elements are dramatically less and more emphasis is placed on the functional attributes of products and services. The research that Mr. Klaus is doing appears to be limited to the consumer market.

Since the development of a scale that measures the customer experience becomes an overwhelming task, I believe Mr. Klaus is taking his measures from the customer corridor. By that I mean the questions that he proposes will pertain to the different ways a customer can experience the company by walking through the corridors (people and processes) of the company.

From this research Mr. Klaus has developed a scale that provides measures and weighting of each of the attributes of the customer experience. The bottom line is that his results may end up being no different that many scales that we see today. However, he has a great concept and only tying his research hypothesis to the real world with real data will tell the story.

The last bottom line is that the industry needs a consistent quality measure of the customer experience. There are many quality measures in use and proposed in the marketplace but none have risen to the top and become the standard.