Chapter Three

Customer Expectations of Services

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 Chapter Three

Chapter Outline
CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS OF SERVICES
✓ Meaning and types of service expectations
✓ Factors influencing customer expectations on
services
✓ Model of customer service expectations
✓ Issues involved in customer service expectations

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 Meaning and types of service expectations
✓ Customer expectations are beliefs about service
industry that function as standards or reference point
against which performance is judged.

✓ The need, wants, and preconceived ideas of a customer

about a product or service.

✓ It can be created by previous experience, advertising,

hearsay, awareness of competitors, and brand image.

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 Customer Expectations: Further Defined
✓ Ideal expectations Or desires; ‘Everyone says this
restaurant is as good as one in Dubai and I want to
go somewhere very special for my anniversary.’

✓ Normative ‘should’ expectations : ‘As expensive as

this restaurant is, it ought to have excellent food
service.’

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 Cont…
✓ Minimum tolerable expectations : ‘I expect terrible
service from this restaurant but come because the
price is low.’
✓ Acceptable expectations; ‘I expect this restaurant to
serve me in an adequate manner.’
✓ Experience based norms; ‘Most times this
restaurant is very good, but when it gets busy the
service is slow.’

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 Levels of expectations
✓ Customers hold different types of expectations
about service.
✓ The highest can be termed desired service: the
level of service the customer hopes to receive –
the ‘wished for’ level of performance.
✓ Desired service is a blend of what the customer
believes ‘can be’ and ‘should be’.

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 Levels of expectations
➢ Demand may constrain the availability of service. In
this situation and in general, customers hope to
achieve their service desires but recognize that this is
not always possible.
➢ We call the threshold level of acceptable service
adequate service – the level of service the customer
will accept.
➢ Adequate service represents the ‘minimum tolerable
expectation’, the bottom level of performance
acceptable to the customer.

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 Levels of expectations
❖Thus, these two expectation standards serve us
to grasp the upper and lower boundaries for
customer expectations. what they desire and
what they believe acceptable.
❖Do customers hold the same or different
expectation levels for service firms in the same
industry?

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 Levels of expectations
❖“Levels of expectation are why two organizations in
the same business can offer far different levels of
service and still keep customers happy.
❖ Customers typically hold similar desired
expectations across categories of service, but these
categories are not as broad as whole industries.
❖A customer’s desired service expectation for fast-food
restaurants is quick, convenient, tasty food in a clean
setting.

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 Levels of expectations
❖The desired service expectation for an expensive
restaurant, usually involves elegant surroundings,
kind employees, candlelight and fine food.
❖In essence, desired service expectations seem to be
the same for service providers within industry
categories or subcategories that are viewed as similar
by customers.

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 Levels of expectations
➢ The adequate service expectation level, may vary for
different firms within a category or subcategory.
➢ Within fast-food restaurants, a customer may hold a
higher expectation for McDonald’s than for Burger
King, having experienced consistent service at
McDonald’s over time and somewhat inconsistent
service at Burger King.

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 The zone of tolerance
❖Services are heterogeneous- performance may vary
across providers, across employees from the same
provider, and even with the same service employee.
❖The extent to which customers recognize and are
willing to accept this variation is called the zone of
tolerance.
❖If service drops below adequate service – the
minimum level considered acceptable – customers
will be frustrated and their satisfaction with the
company will be undermined.

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 Cont…
• If service performance is higher than the zone of
tolerance at the top end – where performance exceeds
desired service – customers will be very pleased and
probably quite surprised as well.
• Marketer must understand not just the size and
boundary levels for the zone of tolerance but also
when and how the tolerance zone fluctuates with a
given customer.

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 Factors influence customer expectations of service
Marketers need to understand and control the factors that
shape them. but many of the forces that influence
customer expectations are uncontrollable.
Sources of desired service expectations
The two largest influences on desired service level are
1. personal needs and philosophies about service
➢ Are those states or conditions essential to the physical or
psychological well-being of the customer including
physical, social, psychological and functional.
➢ E.g. A cinema-goer

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 Factors influence customer expectations of service
2.Lasting service intensifiers are individual, stable factors
that lead the customer to a heightened sensitivity to
service. One of the most important of these factors can
be called derived service expectations, which occur
when customer expectations are driven by another
person or group of people.
❖A parent choosing a vacation for the family, an employee
choosing an office for the firm
❖Business-to-business customers may also derive their
expectations from their managers and supervisors.

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 Sources of adequate service expectations
❖These influences are short term and tend to
fluctuate more than the factors that influence desired
service. There are five factors that influence adequate
service:
I. Temporary service intensifiers
II. Perceived service alternatives
III.Customer self-perceived service role
IV.Situational factors
V. Predicted service

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 1. Temporary service intensifiers
❖Consists of short-term, individual factors that make a
customer more aware of the need for service.
❖E.g. Personal emergency situations an accident in
which service is urgently needed and the need for car
insurance or
❖a breakdown in office equipment during a busy
period) raise the level of adequate service
expectation, particularly the level of responsiveness.

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 2. Perceived Service Alternatives
➢ Are other providers from whom the customer can
obtain service.
➢ If customers have multiple service providers to
choose from, or if they can provide the service for
themselves (like personal grooming), their levels of
adequate service are higher .
➢ It is important that service marketers fully
understand the complete set of options that customers
view as perceived alternatives.

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 3.Customer’s self-perceived service role
Customer perceptions of the degree to which customers
exert an influence on the level of service they receive.
➢ Customers’ expectations are partly shaped by how well
they believe they are performing their own roles in
service delivery.
➢ The customer role is to specify the level of service
expected.
➢ Customers’ zones of tolerance expand when they sense
they are not fulfilling their role and vice versa.

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 4. Situational factors
❖Are service performance conditions that
customers view as beyond the control of the
service provider.
❖E.g. catastrophes (floods or storms) may lower
service expectations because customers
recognize that companies are overwhelmed with
demands for their services.
❖Situational factors temporarily lower the level of
adequate service, widening the zone of tolerance.

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 5. Predicted service
❖The level of service that customers believe they are
likely to get.
❖Can be viewed as predictions made by customers about
what is likely to happen during an impending transaction
or exchange.
❖If customers predict good service, their levels of
adequate service are likely to be higher than when
predict poor.
❖E.g. Travelers may expect poorer service from no-frills
airline than full-cost airlines.

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 Predicted service
❖Desired and adequate service expectations are global
assessments comprising many individual service
transactions,
❖Predicted service is almost always an estimate of
what will happen in the next service encounter or
transaction that the customer experiences.
❖Due to this, predicted service is viewed in this model
as an influencer of adequate service. because
predictions are about individual service encounters,
they are likely to be more concrete and specific .

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 Sources of desired and predicted service expectations
❖When consumers are interested in purchasing services,
they are likely to seek or take in information from
different sources. E.g. by active and passive types of
external search for information, and consumers may
conduct an internal search by reviewing the information
held in their memory about the service.
❖ Explicit service promises,
❖Implicit service promises,
❖Word-of-mouth communications and
❖ Past experience.

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 Explicit service promise
❖Are personal and non-personal statements about the
service made by the organization to customers.
❖ Explicit service promises are completely in the control
of the service provider.
❖They shape what customers desire in general as well as
what they predict will happen in the next service
encounter from a particular service provider or in a
certain service encounter.

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 Implicit service promises
❖Are service-related cues other than explicit promises
that lead to inferences about what the service should
and will be like.
❖These quality cues are dominated by price and the
tangibles associated with the service.
❖ the higher the price and the more impressive the
tangibles, the more a customer will expect from the
service.
❖Customer who stays at a five-star hotel is likely to
desire and predict a higher standard of service than
from a hotel with less impressive facilities.
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 Word-of-mouth communication
❖These personal and sometimes non-personal
statements made by parties other than the
organization convey to customers what the service
will be like.
❖It carries particular weight as an information source
because it is perceived unbiased.
❖Tends to be very important in services that are
difficult to evaluate before purchase. Experts
(including consumer reports, friends and family) are
also word-of-mouth sources that can affect the levels
of desired and predicted service.

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 Past experience
❖Customer’s previous exposure to service that
is relevant to the focal service. The service
relevant for prediction can be previous
exposure to the focal firm’s service.
❖E.g. you probably compare each stay in a
particular hotel with all previous stays in that
hotel. You may also compare each stay with
your experiences in other hotels and hotel
chains.

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 Reading assignment
identify different Possible influence strategies
for each factors of expectation.

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 JUSTIFY THE MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT CUSTOMER
EXPECTATIONS :as a marketer.
1 What does a service marketer do if customer
expectations are ‘unrealistic’?
2 Should a company try to delight the customer?
3 How does a company exceed customer service
expectations?
4 Do customer service expectations continually
escalate?
5 How does a service company stay ahead of
competition in meeting customer expectations?
6 Explain the model of customer service expectations

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