|
INTERNET EXERCISES
Chapter 12: Services
Exercise 1 – Successful Services Provide Unique Experiences
Exercise 2 – Small Business Services
Exercise 1 – Successful Services Provide Unique
Experiences
Vignette: Toronto-based Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
is the world’s largest provider of upscale lodging for the rich
and famous. By offering exclusive and personalized services, its brand
names — Four Seasons and Regent — have come to mean luxury.
Featured URL: www.fourseasons.com
Consistency is Important in Service Industries
The Four Seasons Hotel chain’s highly personalized service originated
with founder Isadore Sharp. His goal was to create a group of medium-size
hotels with exceptional quality. By 1990, the chain consisted of 22 hotels
in three countries: Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Today it operates the
51 properties in 22 countries. All offer consistently exclusive services.
The key to this service is great staff capable of treating celebrities
like ordinary people and ordinary people like celebrities. They hire “people
who feel that serving another human being is their calling. ‘No’
isn’t part of their vocabulary.”
.
Activity
Tour the featured Web site for Four Seasons Hotels. Look at the information
they provide on their newest hotel openings and update your understanding
of the current number of hotels the chain operates and the current number
of countries it operates in. Note the rates associated with staying
at a few locations of your choice.
The “Four Seasons Firsts” section under “About Four
Seasons,” then “Company Information,” lists the innovations
that have become the chain’s hallmarks. Review each of these innovations
and classify them in terms of having search qualities, experience qualities,
or credence qualities.
Review this list of innovations again and consider how they reflect
the use of marketing strategies to overcome the service characteristics
of intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability.
Identify at least three marketing strategies discussed in the text that
Four Seasons relies on to overcome one or more of these characteristics.
The “services marketing triangle” indicates that there
are three aspects of marketing that must take place in order for a service
firm to be successful: external marketing, internal marketing, and interactive
marketing. Clearly, the Four Seasons Web site is part of the chain’s
external marketing effort (between the firm and the customer). Does
the Web site play any role in the chain’s internal and interactive
marketing efforts? Should it and, if so, how would you suggest altering
the Web site for these purposes?
Resources
Other companies in the luxury travel industry:
Luxury Link Traveler – a vacation planner
for luxury destinations and accommodations
Whistler.Com – provides a comprehensive selection
of luxury accommodations in Whistler, B.C.
Information about the service sector in Canada:
Industry Canada – a March
2001 government report providing an overview of Canada’s service
economy
Exercise 2 – Small Business Services
Featured URL: www.postclub.com
Small Businesses Can Provide Services that Big Businesses Can’t
or Won’t
Some customer needs are too personal or specialized for big business to
attempt to address. An example of this is the Post Club, an introduction/dating
service that has been operating in Boston since 1988. The Post Club claims
to be the oldest, largest, most respected and most versatile organization
of its kind in New England. It not only matches up singles looking to
meet other singles, it runs events for them to get together. A key measure
of its success is the number of engagements or marriages it has helped
arrange.
Activity
Tour the featured Web site for The Post Club. Relate
the four characteristics of intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity,
and perishability to the services this organization provides.
- Figures 12.4 and 12.5 in the text model and summarize five possible
gaps in service delivery. Do all of these gaps apply to an introduction/dating
service? Which ones are most likely to occur with this type of service?
Back
to Internet Exercises
|
|
