Services Marketing Mix Assessing the Value of

Services Marketing Mix Assessing the Value of the Services Marketing Mix The Services Marketing Mix is comprised of people, process and physical evidence. All three of these components of the services marketing mix are critical for ensuring customer's experiences meet or exceed expectations. There is a continual conflict in many services businesses between the expectations set with customers relative to the experiences delivered. The combining of people, process, and physical evidence is crucial for experiences to meet or exceed expectations on a consistent basis.

Services create value by providing a clear indication of what they are going to deliver, and then measuring over time how effectively customers' expectations have been met or not (Gronroos, Ravald, 2011). People, process and physical evidence are critical for the expectations and promises created in services marketing to be fulfilled and value created for the customer.

Analysis of People, Process and Physical Evidence Airlines are a prime example of how the traditional 4 Ps of marketing, when combined with the services marketing mix, can be used to create highly innovative ways of delivering value to customers. Southwest Airlines successfully uses the services marketing mix to create unique customer experiences that consistently exceed customers' expectations of service and on-time flights, safety and reliability (Chesbrough, 2011).

Southwest has been able to do this through a unique approach to open innovation, where they regularly solicit feedback, both good and bad, from customers, their own staff, and from key influencers on social networks how they can improve (Chesbrough, 2011). The result is that Southwest is creating a very agile, market-driven culture within the company that puts the customer experience above all else and strives to meet or exceed their expectations over time.

Another service that successfully combines people, process, and physical evidence is Marriott Hotels, who is listed as the top-performing hotel chain by the American Customer Satisfaction Index this year. Marriott is heavily focused on process improvement and quality management of the entire customer experience. The company also has taken a very active role in defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics of performance for managing each aspect of the customer or guest experience, from check in through the stay, to check-out.

Each Marriott hotel is evaluated monthly on a series of KPIs and metrics to determine how their level of service quality is progressing. It is common to see forward-thinking businesses choose to rely on measures of performance over just anecdotal data in evaluating the service quality of their businesses (Gronroos, Ravald, 2011).

Marriott has discovered that when KPIs and metrics are used for evaluating processes and attempting to find the best possible strategy going forward, they can quickly replicate the same actions and initiatives across their global chain of hotels and attain comparable results globally (Hopkins,.