Service Marketing: Customer Perception, Satisfaction, and Retention

SERVICE MARKETING 1
Service marketing
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SERVICE MARKETING 2
Introduction
Service quality is the perception in customers’ minds planning on purchasing products
or services in today’s market (Chaston 2012, p.78). For the customers to be satisfied, their
expectations on quality should be greater than their perceptions about the services they believe
should be provided by the company. Service quality, customer loyalty, and satisfaction are
crucial factors in global markets downturn for profitability, productivity and also retention in the
business as a whole. Through service quality, a company is able to evaluate and investigate
customer perceived and expected service attributes the outcome to their business (Bitner, 2016, p
240). This report will look into service quality, customer satisfaction, and also customer
perception toward services offered by companies to their customers. We will also take a look at
customer complains towards the services they have received and the strategies to handle those
complains. We shall also look at customer retention and loyalty and their benefits to the
business.
Service delivery failure scenario
In the restaurant that I used to work, we used to put on some music which we thought
was entertaining customers. we weren’t wrong, as a matter of fact, most of the customers we
received were young people as our restaurants were situated next to a college, hence, a bigger
percentage of our customers were students, though there were still other customers who were
older in age. We had an elderly couple as our customers one day who complained to me as I was
their server that day, about the loud music as they had a very hard time hearing each other over
the music. When I was confronted with this situation, I had to politely explain to them that the
music was adjustable which we would later adjust by lowering the volume. But the younger

SERVICE MARKETING 3
generation of customers used to murmur a lot when the volume is reduced as that wasn’t the first
time a server had to adjust the volume due to some complaints from the customers they served.
But this was a challenge to the staff as we usually had a hard time trying to balance our
customers experience variables like music volume and the lighting. I know for a fact that this
cost us some potential customers as some of would just leave if they didn’t like the loud music or
when the music volume is reduced. We needed our bosses to come in and help us solve the issue
in order to accommodate every customer who came to our restaurant as we wanted them to enjoy
the services they were getting from our restaurant for them to come back. We knew that the way
we would handle the situation would determine whether we would retain the customers we had
and also whether they would be fully satisfied with our services in general.
This was an instrumental complaint as the purpose of the complaint was to alter the
undesirable state of affairs which in this case is the music. Every customer who came into the
restaurants had his or her own preferences when it came to the issue of music volume (Wang
2017, p. 23). Hence, customers who complained were expecting that the music volume would be
adjusted to their preferred volume which irritated the other customers. In our restaurant, we
understood that understanding and meeting customer expectation to the best of our ability
translates in succeeding in the competitive market (Rust 2016, p. 89). But in our case, some of
the customers would feel dissatisfied when one of their experience variables is adjusted from
they prefer which cost us some customers. Most customers form expectations of the services
they want to get based on their own prior experiences, preferences and their familiarity which
was the main problem and cause of service quality failure we experienced at our place of work
(Mcdonald 2015, p. 49). Expectations and perceptions vary from one customer to another. The