The Role of Customers Within the Organisation

The “key characteristic of a service is that it takes place at the interface with the customer”, therefore without customers the service does not exist (Maull, Geraldi & Johnston 2012). The role of the customer within a florist is to identify their needs and wants and communicate as effectively as possible to the service provider.

There is significant variance in the amount of participation that customers apply, and the optimal level may not always be reached (Gallan et al. 2012). As illustrated in Figure 11.1, a florist’s customer’s optimal level of participation is moderate. A florist like Canary Jane’s Flowers requires customer inputs for an adequate outcome but the florist still provides the range of flowers. It is not considered high participation because the client participation does not guide what flowers you buy, and customer does not co-create the outcome, like a personal trainer would.

The customer needs to be able to demonstrate the desire to search for information or a particular product, or able to create a flower arrangement order. In Canary Jane’s case the customer would either want to search for information about what they want, whether it be flowers or a gift, or have the ability to understand what type of flowers they want and order an arrangement. The employee provides product knowledge, organisation offerings and an end result; regardless if there is a sale or not.

It’s important to highlight that Canary Jane’s is a family friendly business; they sell some children toys and therefore attract a lot of adult customers with infants. Children can be stubborn and not obedient when they are told not to touch items, you can only control children to a certain extent. Due to this these customers are not able to perform their role in the service. However, Canary Jane’s have implemented a strategic method of dealing with such customers, they have put all the unbreakable and not precious items on the low height so this way the children can still touch items but there is no issue of them breaking these items.

The organisation, although a service, creates tangible aspects to support the intangible service. For instance, at Canary Jane’s Flowers they provide a business card of contact details on the gift bag with the purchase as well as a physical copy of the debit card receipt, (refer to appendix photos 11.21, 11.22, 11.23) therefore the business played their role in this encounter but if the customer does not follow through with their implicit role of storing their receipt for a reasonable period, then a resolution in order to resolve post purchase issues from the customer’s side has not been fulfilled. Since Canary Jane’s Flowers has attached their business details, it’s the customer’s implicit responsibility to contact the store if an issue arises; this is in both parties best interest. This leads into complaint behaviour and how to deal with complaints.

References: 


Maull, R, Geraldi, J & Johnston, R 2012, 'Service Supply Chains: A Customer Perspective', Journal of Supply Chain Management, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 72-86.

Gallan, A, Jarvis, C, Brown, S & Bitner, M 2012, 'Customer positivity and participation in services: an empirical test in a health care context', Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 338-356.

The Role of Employees Within the Organisation

Employees are as vital for delivering a brand’s message as they are for delivering the business’ product or service. Their performance and satisfaction drives external service value and customer satisfaction, and their labour is as much emotional as it is operational. At Canary Jane’s Flowers, the nature of their products mean that customer relationships are particularly personal, and so the emotional labour of running the shop is increased.

The service profit chain model (see Figure 10.1) establishes the link between internal service quality and profitability, via employee and customer satisfaction (Heskett et al. 1994), the two of which are interlinked and feed from one another. In small business, the relationship between customers and employees is particularly close, and particularly important for profitability.

These relationships require emotional labour from employees, which is the performance by of expected emotions, which can be performed through changing facial expression, termed ‘surface acting’, or changing inner feelings, termed ‘deep acting’ (Grandey 2003). Deep acting is much more convincing to customers, and as such it is more desirable. Both forms of acting form part of the ‘labour’ in ‘emotional labour’, as it is mentally strenuous to maintain such a performance.

Better even that deep acting is the display of genuine emotion that aligns with the needs of an organisation, although it is much more rare and cannot be taught (Ashforth & Humphrey 1993). This has the advantage that it is not laborious, as it doesn’t involve any acting at all.

Emotional labour also includes the management of service-related conflict, and can markedly affect perceptions of service quality. Empathy, responsiveness, assurance, and reliability are all measures of how an employee connects with customers and are important factors in crafting customer satisfaction (Lee, Lee & Yoo 2000).

The application of the service profit chain to Canary Jane’s Flowers results in a somewhat simplified model; with a single owner-operator in Rebecca Stacey, employee retention stops being a consideration. Similarly, employee satisfaction, productivity, and internal service quality are merged as almost all customer service responsibilities are on one person.

Employee and customer satisfaction are also interlinked very strongly at Canary Jane’s Flowers because both parties are particularly involved in their service encounters. Ms Stacey’s emotional involvement is enhanced by her role as both floral designer and business owner, meaning she has a greater stake in business performance and ownership over the products she designs and sells. The customer’s involvement is also increased by the nature of flowers as a product, because they are so closely linked with relationships and emotion. This involvement necessitates engagement between parties on a personal level and requires a high level of emotional labour.

Typically, in service encounters with high involvement and emotional stakes, such as Canary Jane’s Flowers, deep acting is necessary. As mentioned above though, Ms Stacey has a genuine emotional stake in the business and its transactions so isn’t as affected by the emotional labour of acting. Often service employees require systems of support to help continue their acting without burn-out (Stevenson 1994).

References:

Heskett, J, Jones, T, Loveman, G, Sasser Jr., W & Schlesinger, L 1994, 'Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work', Harvard Business Review, vol. 72, no. 2, pp. 164-170.

Grandey, A 2003, 'When "The Show Must Go On": Surface Acting and Deep Acting As Determinants of Emotional Exhaustion and Peer-Rated Service Delivery.', Academy of Management Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 86-96.

Ashforth, B & Humphrey, R 1993, 'Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of Identity.',Academy of Management Review, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 88-115.

Lee, H, Lee, Y & Yoo, D 2000, 'The determinants of perceived service quality and its relationship with satisfaction', Journal of Services Marketing, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 217-231.

Stevenson, J 1994, 'Employee burnout and perceived social support', Journal of Health and Human Resources Administration, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 350-367.

Monitoring and Researching Service Success and Failure

Monitoring and evaluating service performance is important because it allows for improvement throughout the service profit chain. Measurement and analysis allows businesses to make decisions based on data, lowering their exposure to risk and providing more predictable results (Gale 1992). Small businesses such as Canary Jane’s Flowers have less need and means to monitor performance, due to smaller sample sizes and more intimate existing knowledge of the business and customers, but such research still holds substantial value for service improvement.

It is common and natural for business operators to self-assess their performance against their past performance and objectives, but it is generally unreliable when done without structure, analysis and impartiality (Parker 2012). Canary Jane’s currently has unstructured performance measurement without formal metrics, consisting of a personal awareness of repeating customers, and reviews on external websites. The business is incidentally reviewed extremely well, with an average 4.9 star rating from 35 reviews on Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Etsy. Reviews and ratings are currently the only impartial measurement of Canary Jane’s performance.

Measurement of returning customers is important as it is much cheaper and easier to retain customers than it is to attract new ones (Hennig-Thurau & Klee 1997). As such, customer retention rates are a very important metric to measure. Measuring retention rate is a simple calculation comparing a quantity of new customers to existing customers, but requires those two points of data. Returning and new customers can be counted simply by asking all customers if they have shopped at Canary Jane’s before, with figures stored and compared and monthly intervals to assess retention and attrition rates. A services success or failure will also be impacted by the organisations ability to manage capacity and demand.

References: 

Parker, D 2012, Service Operations Management, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham: UK, pp. 285-287.

Hennig-Thurau, T & Klee, A 1997, 'The impact of customer satisfaction and relationship quality on customer retention: A critical reassessment and model development', Psychology and Marketing, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 737-764.

Gale, B 1992, Monitoring customer satisfaction and market-perceived quality, American Marketing Association, Chicago.