Interesting course. Would appreciate if you keep us posted about the next courses
The content of the next Executive Program in Marketing of Services is focused on getting participants to learn how to lead and manage successful service organizations by delivering quality services to the marketplace within a dynamic environment. The core of the course is structured around understanding and developing strategies to address four key content areas adapted from the service quality gap model. These four areas are described below.
Closing Gap 1: Understanding Customer Expectations and Perceptions
The course is based on understanding consumers’ expectations and perceptions of services. Participants learn how consumers’ expectations (the standards of performance against which service experiences are compared) are formed, how they change and what firms can do to influence expectations. They also explore customer perceptions of service quality and how the interactions between customers and firms (service encounters) affect perceived value and quality.
Not knowing what customers expect is often a key cause of a firm’s failure to deliver service quality. Participants need to learn the appropriate research tools for understanding customers’ service expectations as well as approaches for understanding and managing current customer relationships.
Closing Gap 2: Specifying Service Standards and Offerings
A recurring theme in service organizations such as yours is the difficulty experienced in translating customer expectations into service concepts, service designs and specific standards for service delivery. The intangibility, heterogeneity and perishability of services make these tasks particularly challenging. Participants learn to develop customer‑defined (rather than company‑defined) service standards, to understand the role of service leaders and to apply specific tools (e.g., service blueprinting) for designing and positioning intangibles in order to address these critical issues.
Closing Gap 3: Delivering Service
Even when guidelines exist for performing services well and treating customers correctly, high quality service performance is not a certainty. To address this problem, participants need to learn about human resource issues in service firms. These include: selecting service‑oriented people; designing strategies for empowering service workers; and implementing training programs and reward structures linked to service quality. Understanding the impact of intermediaries and defining the role of customers in creating service outcomes are also critical issues in delivering quality service.
Closing Gap 4: Communicating with Customers
Promises made by a service organization through its advertising, sales force and other forms of communication may potentially raise customer expectations beyond what can actually be delivered. In this instance, participants explore how pricing, physical evidence, service guarantees, and other forms of communication (as well as the nature of the interfunctional communication between marketing and operations groups) can have a significant effect on customer expectations of service quality.
Through exposure to the frameworks and strategies that relate to the four core areas described above, we believe participants will have the substantive content they need to lead and manage effective service organizations. Throughout the course, they are learning critical new content and ways of viewing traditional marketing content that will be required for effective leaders of the future.
Most participants are inherently interested in services marketing because of their personal experiences as service consumers and providers. We integrate such an “active learning” approach very effectively into the services marketing course since participants’ past services experiences allow them to construct new knowledge fairly easily based on existing situations within your company. Learn more on our training methods.....
