Marketing Management: The Big Picture

chapter nine

SERVICE AS PRODUCT

“Nothing is so reasonable and cheap as good manners.”

Cervantes, Saavedra, M. de. (1786).

The history and adventures of the renowned Don Quixote. Translated by T. Smollet and Francis Hayman. Printed for W. Strahan, J. and F. Rivington, W. Johnston, R. Baldwin, T. Longman, Hawes and Co., London. Vol. 3, p. 379.

After studying this chapter you should be able to:

1. Contrast products and services
2. Describe the characteristics of services
3. Map the customer service experience
4. Explain how to manage the concept of Zone of Tolerance for customer satisfaction
5. Describe the relationship between customer service and customer satisfaction
6. Integrate services with other elements of the Big Picture framework

IBM's Transition from Computers to Software and Services

When Louis Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM in 1993, he observed that its customers increasingly required not just help with technology products, but also a partner to integrate the various platforms and align them to their business processes to obtain more intelligence from their information. For IBM to play that role, and to fulfill its goal of becoming a “world-class services company,” Gerstner believed it needed to be better integrated internally. He brought together multiple internal networks under IBM Global Network in 1994 and in 1995 created the IBM Global Services unit, which by the late 1990s was organized around lines of business that corresponded to customer needs. The unit had dedicated groups ...