Rushahed Manzur

Psychology of Service Customers: It may seem like the topic of service management has been exhausted. Legions of scholars and practitioners have applied queuing theory to bank lines, measured response times to the millisecond, and created cults around "delighting the customer." But practitioners haven't carefully considered the underlying psychology of service encounters--the feelings that customers experience during these encounters, feelings often so subtle they probably couldn't be put into words. Fortunately, behavioral science offers new insights into better service management. These are findings from behavioral-science research into five operating principles: 1) finish strong; 2) get the bad experiences out of the way early; 3) segment the pleasure, combine the pain; 4) build commitment through choice; and 5) give people rituals and stick to them. Ultimately, only one thing really matters in a service encounter--the customer's perception of what occurred. At core, psychology and business have a lot in common. Both seek to understand human being’s needs, desires, choices, and behaviors. What do people really want? What motivates people to make the decisions that they do? These are the types of questions that any psychologist or businessman should be asking themselves on a daily basis if they want to be successful. And any good psychologist or businessman doesn’t have to search long before they realize the importance of relationships in our everyday life, in our everyday choices, and especially in terms of business. When we buy products or services from someone else, we want to feel safe and trusting of that person. We want to feel accepted. And we want to feel like the people we are doing business with really care about us and our needs. Without that relationship, most businesses can’t last very long. Traditionally, this is the job of “customer service.” Customer service is a series of activities, before or after the purchase of a product, that are designed to enhance overall customer satisfaction. A company may be able to sell a product once with poor customer service, but good customer service plays a huge role in retaining customers and keeping a loyal fan base. Service quality and customer satisfaction are important concepts to academic researchers studying consumer evaluations and to practitioners as a means of creating competitive advantages and customer loyalty. The ” Distinguishing Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: The Voice of the Consumer” article presents two studies that rely on divergent methodologies to examine whether or not quality and satisfaction have distinct antecedent causes, consequential effects, or both (i.e., whether or not they should be considered a single construct, or distinct, separable constructs). We focus on consumers’ understanding and use of the words quality and satisfaction; in both studies, respondents report whether or not they think quality and satisfaction differ, and if so, on what dimensions or under what circumstances. In the first study, we use the qualitative “critical incident” technique to elicit service attributes that are salient to respondents when prompted to consider quality and satisfaction as distinct. We code the responses to these open-ended survey questions to examine whether quality can be teased apart from satisfaction, from the respondents’ (consumers’) perspective. In the second study, to triangulate on the qualitative data, we experimentally manipulated a number of service attributes drawn from both the first study and from the literature to see whether or not they have differential impacts on judgments of quality and satisfaction. We did not presuppose that quality and satisfaction differ—rather, we asked respondents to make a judgment either of quality or of satisfaction, defining the term as they saw fit. We inferred from their judgments