Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing which emerged as a separate field of study in the early 1980s, following the recognition that the unique characteristics of services required different strategies compared with the marketing of physical goods.
SERVQUAL is a multi-dimensional research instrument designed to capture consumer expectations and perceptions of a service along five dimensions which are said to represent service quality. SERVQUAL is built on the expectancy–disconfirmation paradigm, which, in simple terms, means that service quality is understood as the extent to which consumers' pre-consumption expectations of quality are confirmed or disconfirmed by their actual perceptions of the service experience. The SERVQUAL questionnaire was first published in 1985 by a team of academic researchers in the United States, A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard L. Berry, to measure quality in the service sector.
Customer satisfaction is a term frequently used in marketing to evaluate customer experience. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of customers, or percentage of total customers, whose reported experience with a firm, its products, or its services (ratings) exceeds specified satisfaction goals." Enhancing customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty are pivotal for businesses, given the significant importance of improving the balance between customer attitudes before and after the consumption process.
The UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School is the business school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Founded in 1919, the school was renamed to its current name in 1991 in honor of Mary Lily Kenan and her husband, Henry Flagler.
Customer equity is the total combined customer lifetime values of all of the company's customers. It is calculated by multiplying the number of customers by the average value of each customer. Customer equity is important because it reflects the potential future revenue that a company can generate from its existing customer base.
Rajendra K. Srivastava is Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at the Indian School of Business. He has been a tenured professor and an academic administrator and has worked in the United States, Singapore, and India. He has been listed in the Forbes's Tycoons of Tomorrow 2018. He is also a member of the board of directors of Happiest Minds, a publicly listed company in India.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:
Inseparability is a term used in marketing to describe a key quality of services as distinct from goods, namely the characteristic that a service has which renders it impossible to divorce the supply or production of the service from its consumption. Other key characteristics of services include perishability, intangibility and variability.
Customer retention refers to the ability of a company or product to retain its customers over some specified period. High customer retention means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations generally attempt to reduce customer defections. Customer retention starts with the first contact an organization has with a customer and continues throughout the entire lifetime of a relationship and successful retention efforts take this entire lifecycle into account. A company's ability to attract and retain new customers is related not only to its product or services, but also to the way it services its existing customers, the value the customers actually perceive as a result of utilizing the solutions, and the reputation it creates within and across the marketplace.
Intangibility refers to the lack of palpable or tactile property making it difficult to assess service quality. According to Zeithaml et al., “Because services are performances, rather than objects, they cannot be seen, felt, tasted, or touched in the same manner in which goods can be sensed.” As a result, intangibility has historically been seen as the most important distinction between services and products in the literature on services marketing. Other key characteristics of services include perishability, inseparability and variability.
Rockbridge Associates, Inc. is a market research firm located in Great Falls, Virginia that specializes in issues for technology and services companies and associations. Rockbridge offers services addressing business issues such as product development, customer satisfaction, segmentation, branding and pricing. The firm provides the National Technology Readiness Survey, which has tracked consumer technology beliefs since 1999. Rockbridge is a member of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO).
Service quality (SQ), in its contemporary conceptualisation, is a comparison of perceived expectations (E) of a service with perceived performance (P), giving rise to the equation SQ = P − E. This conceptualistion of service quality has its origins in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm.
The Journal of Service Research is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of business studies. The current editor-in-chief is Ming-Hui Huang. The journal was established by Roland Rust in 1998 and is published by SAGE Publications. The Journal of Service Research is sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Leonard L. "Len" Berry is a University Distinguished Professor of Marketing of Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Berry is a past president of the American Marketing Association. He has studied service delivery in healthcare at the Mayo Clinic and in cancer care settings. Berry is Texas A&M's most cited faculty member on Google Scholar, with over 235,000 citations.
Business services are a recognisable subset of economic services, and share their characteristics. The essential difference is that businesses are concerned about the building of service systems in order to deliver value to their customers and to act in the roles of service provider and service consumer.
Rajdeep 'Raj' Grewal is the Townsend Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Marketing Research. He is known for his work on marketing research, marketing strategy and business to business marketing.
Joannes Evangelista Benedictus Maria "Jan-Benedict" Steenkamp is a marketing professor and author. He is the Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the co-founder and executive director of AiMark, a global center studying key marketing strategy issues. Steenkamp is the author of Time to Lead, Retail Disruptors, Global Brand Strategy, Brand Breakout and Private Label Strategy. He is one of the most cited scholars in business and marketing.
Consumer value is used to describe a consumer's strong relative preference for certain subjectively evaluated product or service attributes.
A. "Parsu" Parasuraman is an Indian-American marketing professor and author. He is the Professor and the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami.
Barak Libai is a Professor of Marketing at the Arison School of Business at Reichman University. Libai’s research focusses on the strategic importance of Customer profitability, Word of mouth and other social effects on profitability, Customer retention, and the Diffusion of innovations.
