Solving service failures

All the possible solutions are presented at the table, please, check Appendix 4 for having clearer picture.

4.3.1 Promptness

Promptness is a broad question, and according to the results, is most common at MTC, hence, the company is advised to spend more resources on solving this type of service failure. It is necessary to highlight, “promptness” might occur in view of several existing gaps. To avoid Design and standards gap, it is necessary for a company to provide clear customer-defined standards, for example, there might be guidelines or an advice how long the conversation

between the costumer and staff should be. Advise employees to spend their time efficiently. The next issue in this gap is providing clear instructions for the staff, increasing its awareness of the questions the client might ask and how to answer it. Having on hand clear service guidelines, the staff would spend less time on looking for an answer / solution, and as a result, the time of conversation would become less.

Next gap is performance; to avoid it the company should consider how to increase employees’ motivation. It might be some training for service providers on how to meet service position demands. The next option is rewarding. However, the company should clearly

understand whom to reward, therefore, the company should consider evaluating every single staff’s performance. Performance record can be based on customer satisfaction and evaluated by the service receivers directly. The company might weight installing customer satisfaction survey devices, as they help to evaluate staff’s performance immediately after the service is delivered.

And the third gap which is also connected to the service speed is communication gap. In case information desk does not know how to reply, they should know whom they might ask to help. Hence, the company should provide clear instructions on each employees’ responsibilities and where/how to find right person in the office. It would decrease the time of searching for a person and helps to find the right one.

4.3.2 Queue

The institution faces “Queue” service failure due to Design and standard gap. The company should reconsider its spatial arrangements, making it more easy for a customer to line up without front desk’s help. It is advised to rearrange entrances and exits. At the present

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moment, MTC has 2 entrances/exits, and it misleads customer which door he/she should choose.

These misunderstanding also cause lines interfering. As a result, the front desk employees spend their time on arranging the student proper lines instead of responding directly to the student’s request and consequently increase their time on service delivery process. It is advised to

rearrange entrances, dividing the clients before they enter the office into right place. Next step is to add clear queue and front desk signs. It will help the clients to find the proper line and wait for desired desk without employees help.

4.3.3 Shifting responsibilities

This service failure is connected to communication gap mostly, because, employees do not understand who is responsible for particular problem and spend more time on finding the right person. The company should provide clear guidelines with each staff’s responsibilities.

Moreover, each problem, for example, ARC & Visa should have at least 2 responsible persons in the office, it would deal with the situation when one person is out, and front desk employee has to spend more time on finding a substitution.

4.3.4 Relevance

Relevance is related to the design and standards and performance gaps. For reaching service recovery in design gap, it is required to help the employees with guidelines or printed materials on how to respond to the student’s question. It would increase its relevance and importance of an answer, at the same time, the student would consider the service more helpful.

About performance gap, it is advised to train employees on how to answer and what materials to provide to the students. The information should be standardized among all employees, so no matter who talks to a student, staff from information desk or back office, all of them should provide helpful answers to a client. Rewarding also might be considered as a tool for encouraging staff to provide highly helpful answers.

4.3.5 Others

As it was mentioned in Chapter 3, author recommends to focus only on 80% of the service failures, meaning that other 20% of them would be reached by solving prior 80%. For example, if company would share similar responsibilities among 2 or even more employees successfully, it would eliminate the possibility of “out of office” problem, because, even if one staff takes personal leave, another staff would be able to help the students. Or “inability to answer” is related to “relevance”, therefore, training and proper guidelines would also exclude

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this service failure. Author’s personal opinion, that due to proper training, the courtesy topic might also arise, because, this is an important issue how to communicate with a client. There is only language barrier left. This service failure is related to several gaps, and one of them is design and standard one, hence the company should focus on speaking foreign languages ability when hiring new employees. However, this problem was faced only several times during

observation, and sometimes student’s ability is also far from desirable, therefore, author recommend not to focus much on this service failure at the present moment. But for future improvements to increase the level of mutual understanding it is advised to use APPs for bilingual translation (for example, Google Translate). If a student is not able to speak neither English, nor Chinese, the staff can use online APP for translating the conversation from client’s mother tongue to Chinese and vice versa. It would increase the level of satisfaction, because using translation APP could make the process of service delivery easier.

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