Competitive Trends in Service Marketing

Competitive Trends in Service Marketing

The most dominant trend influencing the development of services marketing strategies to attain higher levels of satisfaction is a recognition that trust is more critical than ever to foster, grow and sustain. The quantification of trust has been attempted in many diverse measures of customer satisfaction research (Zolkiewski, Lewis, Yuan, Yuan, 2007) including the benchmark SERVQUAL and others. The intent of this paper is to evaluate how services marketing strategies' foundations have shifted away from purely being on based on the development of marketing strategies executed through traditional approaches to more of recognition of how critical it is to foster trust at the momentums of truth that occur every day in services-based businesses.

Main Conclusions

The following conclusions regarding competitive trends in services marketing are first that the moments of truth in services organizations must be marked with a high level of transparency to foster trust, even in the short-term (Lfgren, 2005). This is especially true in the financial services industry where much research has been completed (Tyler & Stanley, 2007). These moments of truth have to be supported by the second main conclusion, which is that the consistency of organizations' services strategies over years of proven execution is a more powerful differentiator than embracing the latest fad or trying to win customers on price alone (Desai, Kalra, Murthi, 2008). Third, there is a strong orientation towards quantifying service performance (Zolkiewski, Lewis, Yuan, Yuan, 2007) through the use of metrics including SERVQUAL and others. This is also leading to the quantification of trust as well. Fourth, the development of customer satisfaction in business-to-business (B2B) selling and service scenarios is increasingly becoming commonplace as well (Zolkiewski, Lewis, Yuan, Yuan, 2007).

Recommendations

The following are recommendations to companies looking to increase customer satisfaction within the services businesses they manage:

First, consider creating a training program to ensure the moments of truth customer service representatives have with customers delivers transparency and fosters trust by having all the essential information available to the service representative (Lfgren, 2005).

Second, don't deviate from your services quality levels to save on costs, as this will be seen as walking away from customers' needs. Instead embrace a more consistent mindset on services strategies and earn customers' trust (Desai, Kalra, Murthi, 2008).