Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

Service Marketing

Delivering Customer Service

When I read the case study of "Starbucks", I had to think of different theories of the "Gaps Model of Service Quality".

One aspect of the model, the "Customer Gap", describes the gap between customer expectations and perceptions. When the expectation doesn’t match with the expectation the gap rises. Every customer has different expectations of services. In the best case, expectations and perception matches with each other or the perception even exceeds the expectation. Every customer has references points on which he or she decides if the service full fills the expectations or not.  In the following a few kinds of reference points could be mentioned witch could influence the customer satisfaction:

• Price
• Personal factors
• Product/Service Quality
• Consumer emotions,...

"Knowledge Gap" / "Listening Gap":  This gap is the difference between customer expectations of a service and firm´s understanding of those expectations. The reason why a lot of enterprises don´t meet customers is, because the company has no accurate understanding of the expectations of the customer. There are many reasons for firms why they don´t know what customers want. For instance: They probably don´t interact directly with the customers, they don´t ask their customers about their expectations, or maybe they are not able to address them. An insufficient marketing research, a research, which is not focused on service quality, or the inadequate use of market research, could also lead to the provider gap-1. Furthermore, insufficient relationship focus (lack of market segmentation, no focus on relationship, focus on new customers rather than relationship customers) and inadequate service recovery (lack of encouragement to listen to the customer complaints, no system to tackle service failures, failure to make amends when things don´t work) are more points, which leads to provider gap-1. When people with authority and responsibility are not able to understand customer service expectations, they may affect a trigger a chain reaction of bad decisions that results in perceptions of poor service quality.