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论优化服务营销增强顾客忠诚（文献翻译） 1
Understanding Customer Requirements
1 Listening to Customers Through Research
1.1 Using Marketing Research to Understand Customer Expectations
Finding out what customers expect is essential to providing service quality, and marketing research is a key vehicle for understanding customer expectations and perceptions of services, In services, as with any offering, a firm that does no marketing research at all is unlikely to understand its customers. A firm that does marketing research, but not on the topic of customer expectations, may also fail to know what is needed to stay in tune with changing customer requirements. Marketing research must focus on service issues such as what features are most important to customers, what levels of these features customers expect, and what customers think the company can and should do when problems occur in service delivery. Even when a service firm is small and has limited resources to conduct research, avenues are open to explore what customers expect.
One of the biggest challenges facing a marketing researcher is converting a complex set of data to a form that can be read and understood quickly by executives, managers, and other employees who will make decisions from the research. For example, database management is being adopted as a strategic initiative by many firms, but merely having a sophisticated database does not ensure that the findings will be useful to managers. Many of the people who use marketing research findings have not been trained in statistics and have neither the time nor the expertise to analyze computer printouts and other technical research information. The goal in this stage of the marketing research process is to communicate information clearly to the right people in a timely fashion. Among considerations are the following: Who gets this information? Why do the need it? How will they use it? Does it mean the same thing across cultures? When users feel confident that they understand the data, they are far more likely to apply it appropriately. When managers do not understand how to interpret the data, or when they lack confidence in the research, the investment of time, skill, and effort will be lost.
1.2 Using Marketing Research Information
Conducting research about customer expectations is only the first part of understanding the customer, even if the research is appropriately designed, executed, and presented. A service firm must also use the research findings in a meaningful
论优化服务营销增强顾客忠诚（文献翻译） 2
way–to drive change or improvement in the way service is delivered. The misuse(or even nonuse)of research data can lead to a large gap in understanding customer expectations. When managers do not read research reports because they are too busy dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the business, companies fail to use the resources available to them. And when customers participate in marketing research studies but never see changes in the way the company does business, they fell frustrated and annoyed with the company. Understanding how to make the best use of research – to apply what has been learned to the business – is a key way to close the gap between customer expectations and management perceptions of customer expectations. Managers must learn to turn research information and insights into action, to recognize that the purpose of research is to drive improvement and customer satisfaction.
The research plan should specify the mechanism by which customer data will be used. The research should be actionable: timely, specific, and credible. It can also have a mechanism that allows a company to respond to dissatisfied customers immediately.
1.3 Upward Communication
In some service firms, especially small and localized firms, owners or managers may be in constant contact with customers, thereby gaining firsthand knowledge of customer expectations and perceptions. But in large service organizations, managers do not always get the opportunity to experience firsthand what their customers want. The larger a company is, the more difficult it will be for managers to interact directly with the customer and the less firsthand information they will have about customer expectations. Even when they read and digest research reports, managers can lose the reality of the customer if they never get the opportunity to experience the actual service. A theoretical view of how things are supposed to work cannot provide the richness of the service encounter. To truly understand customer needs, management benefits form hands-on knowledge of what really happens in stores, on customer service telephone lines, in service queues, and in face-to-face service encounters. If gap 1 is to be closed managers in large firms need some form of customer contact.
2 Building Customer Relationships 2.1
Relationship marketing essentially represents a paradigm shift within marketing – away from an acquisitions/transaction focus toward a retention/relationship focus.
Relationship Marketing
论优化服务营销增强顾客忠诚（文献翻译） 3
Relationship marketing (or relationship management) is a philosophy of doing business, a strategic orientation, that focus on keeping and improving relationships with current customers rather than on acquiring new customers. This philosophy assumes that many consumers and business customers prefer to have an ongoing relationship with one organization than to switch continually among providers in their search for value. Building on this assumption and the fact that it is usually much cheaper to keep a current customer than to attract a new one, successful marketers are working on effective strategies for retaining customers.
It has been suggested that firms frequently focus on attracting customer (the “first act”) but then pay little attention to what they should do to keep them (the “second act”). Ideas expressed in an interview with James L. Schorr, then executive vice president of marketing at Holiday Inns, illustrate this point. In the interview he stated that he was famous at Holiday Inns for what is called the “bucket theory of marketing.” By this he meant that marketing can be thought of as a big bucket: It is what sales, advertising, and promotion programs do that pours business into the top of the bucket. As long as these programs are effective, the bucket stays full. However, “There’s only one problem,” he said, “there’s a hole in the bucket,” When the business is running well and the hotel is delivering on its promises, the hole is small and few customers are leaving. When the operation is weak and customers are not satisfied with what they get, however, people start falling out of the bucket through the holes faster than they can be poured in through the top.
The bucket theory illustrates why a relationship strategy that focuses on plugging the holes in the bucket makes so much sense. Historically, marketers have been more concerned with acquisition of customers, so a shift to a relationship strategy often represents changes in mind set, organizational culture, and employee reward systems. For example, the sales incentive systems in many organizations are set up to reward bringing in new customers. There are often fewer(or not) rewards for retaining current accounts. Thus, even when people see the logic of customer retention, the existing organizational systems may not support its implementation.
Relationship value of a concept or calculation that looks at customers from the point of view of their lifetime revenue and/or profitability contributions to a company.
The lifetime or relationship value of a customer is influenced by the length of an average “lifetime,” the average revenues generated per relevant time period over the lifetime, sales of additional products and services over time, referrals generated by the customer over time, and costs associated with serving the customer. Lifetime value sometimes refers to lifetime revenue stream only; but most often when costs are considered, lifetime value truly means “lifetime profitability.”
论优化服务营销增强顾客忠诚（文献翻译） 4
If companies knew how much it really costs to lose a customer, they would be able to accurately evaluate investments designed to retain customer. One way of documenting the dollar value of loyal customers is to estimate the increased value or profits that accrue for each additional customer who remains loyal to the company rather than defecting to the competition. This is what Bain & Co. has done for a number of industries, The percentage of increase in total firm profits when the retention or loyalty rate rises by 5 percentage points. The increases are dramatic, ranging from 35 to 95 percent. These increases were calculated by comparing the net present values of the profit streams for the average customer life at current retention rates with the net present values of the profit streams for the average customer life at 5 percent higher retention rates.
With sophisticated accounting systems to document actual costs and revenue streams over time, a firm can be quite precise in documenting the dollar value and costs of retaining customers. These systems attempt to estimate the dollar value of all the benefits and costs associated with a loyal customer, not just the long-term revenue stream. The value of word-of-mouth advertising, employee retention, and declining account maintenance costs can also enter into the calculation.
The emphasis on estimating the relationship value of customers has increased substantially in the past decade. Part of this emphasis has resulted from an increased appreciation of the economic benefits that firms accrue with the retention of loyal customer. (Our Strategy Insight for this chapter describes ways that firms explicitly demonstrate this appreciation to customer.) Interestingly, recent research suggests that customer retention has a large impact on firm value and that relationship value calculations can also provide a useful proxy for assessing the value of a firm. That is, a firm’s market value can be roughly determined by carefully calculating customer lifetime value. The approach is straightforward: Estimate the relationship value of a customer, forecast the future growth of the number of customers, and use these figures to determine the value of a company’s current and future base. To the extent that the customer base forms a large part of a company’s overall value, such a calculation can provide an estimate of a firm’s value — a particularly useful figure for young, high-growth firms for which traditional financial methods(e.g., discounted cash flow) do not work well.
2.2
Companies may want to treat all customers with excellent service, but they generally find that customers differ in their relationship value and that it may be neither practical nor profitable to meet (and certainly not to exceed) all customers’ expectations. Federal Express Corporation, for example, has categorized its customers internally as the good, the bad, and the ugly –– based on their profitability. Rather
Customer Profitability Segments