Service Marketing

2303 Words5 Pages

Introduction

In an ideal situation, customers would not have to wait for the delivery of products and services. However, in the real world, organizations cannot always match exact capability and demand; therefore, waiting is frequently inevitable while purchasing, especially in service marketing, as service firms can barely inventory their “stock” for sale at a later date (Lovelock, 1992, p.154). In general, waiting in lines – known as “queuing”, happens when the number of customers arrive at a facility exceeds the capability of the system to serve them (Lovelock & Wirtz, 2011, p.260). Basically, this essay will state the relationship between queuing and customer satisfaction, as well as relationship between customer satisfaction and business profitability; discuss whether service organizations should seek to minimize queuing.

Relationships

Although researchers suggest that queuing is one of the ways to help managers ration demand in insufficient capacity businesses, customers do not like to wait to be served (Taylor, 1994). The major reason is that queuing is time consuming and brings negative experience most time. For example, a research (Pillay, et al., 2011) shown that 82% of total visit time that patients spent at the clinic was in waiting in Hong Kong public hospitals, patients’ benefits were damaged by the delayed waiting time, as time is a valuable. Additionally, patients became anxious, because they felt uncertain about how long they have to wait. What is even worse, the patient’s health status did not be improved during waiting that suffering was prolonged (Siciliani, Stanciole & Jacobs, 2009). Queuing experience might differ between different industries, from individual to individual, and even by situation fo...

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 Siciliani, L., Stanciolec, A., Jacobs, R., (2009). Do waiting times reduce hospital costs?, Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 28(4), pp. 771-780.

 Spinelli, M.A. & Canavos, G.C., (2000). Investigating the relationship between employee satisfaction and guest satisfaction. Cornel Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 41, pp. 29–33.

 Taylor, S., (1994), Waiting for service: The relationship between delays and evaluations of service. Journal of Marketing, Vol. 58(2), pp. 56-69.

 TOA Technologies, (2010). 2010 Cost of Waiting Survey. [Available on]:

http://toatech.com/costofwaiting/documents/TOA-Cost-of-waiting-3countries.pdf [Accessed on 20th Feb 2012]

 Veeraraghavan, S. & Debo, L., (2009), Joining Longer Queues: Information Externalities in Queue Choice. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Vol. 11(4), pp. 543–562.

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