Customer Service Experience Report

Introduction

A service encounter is defined as the period of time which a customer interacts with a service. Glushko and Tabas (2009) discuss the service experience as being largely focused on the interactions between employees, machines, automated systems, physical facilities and any other service provider visual elements. The perspective of the experience is determined during which contribute to the overall experience. Service quality is determined at the “moment of truth” (Lovelock, Wirtz and Chew (2009) when the service is delivered, in face to face service this quality occurs during the deliver, this interaction is when the consumer is making an indelible impression of the firms. The service industry in recent years have been devoting

The services explored have various levels of intangibility. For example, the service encounter at Harvey World Travel included the physical aspects such as the Travel branch, ticket and brochures. However in regards to using an ATM banking service this encounter was mostly no tangible. The service encounter also varied in the separability of the buyer and provider. For services such as hairdressers, it’s essential that the customer and the employee to be in the same location for the service to be obtained. In contrast to using self-service technologies such as Bookings.com, as there is on contact between employee and customer the consumer plays an integral role in creating the quality of the service, through their behaviour during the process. Furthermore the services are characterised by the inventory, as they are all perishable and cannot be stored for later

In regards to the Harvey World Travel experience the service is a high contact service, were the customer is a moderate co-producer. The customer inputs customer’s information to create a personalised outcome. As recognised in the HWT experience the face to face setting the firm was able to improve the customers confidence and productivity through creating a bond the service was able to be efficient and successful as the customer needs were fulfilled In contrast Bookings.com offered a different type of self-service experience, as this firm is based online the service is a high coproduce as the customer needs to enter organise and select offering from the platform. By being online there is an increased offer available as well as lower cost. However even though the experience was successful, the experience left the customer with some post purchase dissonance, as the customer was not certain of products selected due to the limited amount of current information, which appeared to contradict