Service_Marketing

Service Marketing Of Cathay Pacific Airline Ocean Park [pic] [pic] By Eva Hung Sze Nga Content 1. Introduction 2. Cathay Pacific Airline Customer experience -Customer Choice -Customer journey -Customer experience -Postexperience evaluation -Customer Satisfaction Marketing mix 3. Ocean Park Customer experience -Service characteristics -Service quality Marketing mix Introduction To explain the service marketing in Hong Kong, I chose Cathay Pacific Airline and Ocean Park, as they are the two leading companies in their respective industry to represent two different industries. And also their service qualities are both famous in Hong Kong. Cathay Pacific Airline is the 4th largest airline company in the world and has employed around 27,600 people worldwide. It is a difficult thing to manage a company that has employed almost 30,000 people worldwide, while still keeping a good reputation and a high world ranking at the same time. Service strategies are most important, giving enough training for the employees, Cathay Pacific Airline’s purpose is to make the customer feel warm. It is because its advertisements always show how the flight attendants take care of the customer’s needs. Ocean Park is the only local theme park in Hong Kong, like Hong Kong Disneyland, it focuses on service, and to bring customers an interesting experience. Ocean Park keeps improving their service and facilities, such as opening increasingly attractive and meaningful zones to keep the customers’ feeling fresh. It is more valuable for the local people than Hong Kong Disneyland. Customer experience of Cathay Pacific Airline To operate a worldwide company, good service is the way to keep customers’ loyalty. Cathay Pacific has a slogan, “Great service, great people, great fares!” It shows that Cathay’s main concern is their customers’ needs. Customer choice Before boarding a plane, customers need to go through a decision making process to make sure they buy something useful. First is to recognize what the customer needs, use Tom for example, he is a manager and needs to board a flight from Hong Kong to USA to attend a wedding party, so he has a social need. Then he goes online and searches for an airline company that meets his need. After searching, he found three that suits him, and then he asked his friends or family for advice and past experience. He was still worried that there would be some risks after buying the ticket, so Cathay said it could send him a letter to confirm that he bought the ticket. Tom got the guarantee and started to evaluate Cathay’s service, to find whether Cathay was the cheapest or has the best service as Tom wanted to sit comfortably during the flight. Finally he chose Cathay and bought the ticket online. Customer journey [pic] [pic] (Airline customer journey map, Whatidiscover, http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatidiscover/217822551/) “Use research to understand customer’s views at each step of the journey. This can help illuminate what is driving or undermining loyalty and provide insight to help better meet customers needs and encourage loyalty.” (Tim Arnold, 2008, The marketing director’s handbook, 90) To know more about what customers want, Cathay has to know the customer journey. As customer journey showed what customer feel when they use the service. It provides customer insight to help encourage customer loyalty and also meet customer needs. For example, although Tom had arrived to the airport two hours earlier, he still needs to wait in the long queue. It may make Tom become angry and disappointed with Cathay, at the same time Cathay may lose Tom’s loyalty as they cannot satisfy what Tom needs. Customer experience [pic] (Marianina Manning, http://www.google.com.hk/imgres'imgurl=http://marianina.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/Customer_experience_hierarchy.png&imgrefurl=http://www.marianina.com/blog/category/customer-experience/&h=328&w=480&sz=107&tbnid=GiujC_5zcds3iM:&tbnh=88&tbnw=129&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dcustomer%2Bexperience%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=customer+experience&hl=zh-TW&usg=__1PWHXyHutFdL07fwpO171twZEmo=&sa=X&ei=mN3dTbCZDoqKvQO_5eDSBQ&ved=0CEAQ9QEwAw) In my opinion, customer experience is mainly chained with customer emotion and mood. It is because it can influence customers’ perception, like if Tom is having a bad mood when he arrived to the airport, he will not be happy with the service of the self-service ticket machine although it has already met his perception or even expectation. For him, it still gives him a bad experience. Once a customer has a bad experience, they may have bias and won’t suggest their friends and family to take Cathay, otherwise, it can let customers keep using Cathay or suggest their friends. In addition, if someone has brand loyalty, they may keep using it no matter it is bad or not. Postexperience evaluation To evaluate, Cathay can use how customers behave and their own consequence to prove the likelihood of their behavior. [pic] (Lars Perner, Ph.D., http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/) For example, Tom’s behavior was that he chose Cathay, the consequence for his choice was that he was served badly when he check-in, so the likelihood of his behavior to choose Cathay might decrease. Therefore, according to the above graph, customers may pass the experience to their friends and family by the word-of-mouth, and this directly influences Cathay’s future potential customers’ views. Customer Satisfaction “An evaluation rendered that the experience was at least as good as it was supposed to be.” (Hunt, 1977, 459) After understanding the customers’ need, Cathay has to decide how to satisfy them. To fulfill customer needs, basically Cathay doesn’t need to do something beyond their expectation, but has to at least fulfill their perception. After fulfilling the customers, Cathay can find out a solution to solve problems and make improvements. As a result, Cathay will not only be able to fulfill its customers, but can provide things beyond the customer’s expectation. For instance, if Cathay knew that Tom queued for a long time at the check-in counter, it can open more counters to quickly solve the problem temporary. But for the long term, it can introduce more self-service check-in machines to decrease the crowd in front of the counters. Customers can use self-service check-in machines and there would be a shorter queue in front of the counters, both can save more time and at least meet most of the customers’ perception or even expectation. Marketing mix of Cathay Pacific Airline [pic] (Learnmarketing, http://www.learnmarketing.net/servicemarketingmix.htm) I use 3 out of 7Ps to apply on Cathay Pacific Airline. They are people, physical environment and process. “Recruiting the right staff and training them appropriately in the delivery of their service is essential if the organisation wants to obtain a form of competitive advantage. Consumers make judgments and deliver perceptions of the service based on the employees they interact with.” (Learnmarketing, http://www.learnmarketing.net/servicemarketingmix.htm) The above explains one of the seven factors in the marketing mix theory - People. Cathay trains many new staff every year, but it is not good enough as the marketing mix theory said that recruiting the right staff or keeping the original staff, is better than to employ people that are likely to leave the company. Since Cathay recruited potential new staffs and keeps the original staff, service can be delivered in the way that Cathay wants. Customers can also deliver their perception or expectation to Cathay when they are enjoying the service, such as Tom can let the flight attendants know what he wants Cathay to improve as he wants to help Cathay have improvements and then keep buying its services. The above will result to management. From the outside, Cathay will become better because of customers willingness to provide comments or feedbacks to the company, making the company have continuous improvements. From the inside, the management group should keep an eye on every segment’s movement. For example, if front line staffs deliver some complains or suggestions from customers to their managers, they should take it seriously and find out the best solution to fulfill the customers. It is the advantages to show keeping original staffs and recruiting potential staffs. It could make the whole company structure works smooth and orderly as hired the right people. “Process is an element of service that sees the customer experiencing an organisation's offering.” (Marketing Teacher Ltd., 2000-2011, http://www.marketingteacher.com/lesson-store/lesson-process.html) For the process, effectively and efficiency management on handling feedbacks or complains is the way to make every process to become more smooth and make more and more customers to meet their perception. For example, Tom sit in the plane and wait for the plane take off, he was served by a nice and polite freight attendance, he felt ease and be more comfortable, after that he had a dinner on the plane but the taste was not as good as he think, so he felt a little bit disappointed. When he slept, the man next to him kept talking with him make him felt ignoring. If Tom complained for the dinner, the manager should decide how to improve. “Whatever your customers can see before purchasing. This can include the physical environment, packaging, supporting collateral and anything else that helps in presentation.” (Sales and Marketing for “You”, 2011, http://www.sales-and-marketing-for-you.com/marketing-mix-structure.html) Finally, the physical environment is the tangible things that customer can see, such as the freight attendances’ uniforms, seats, freight tickets, the light over the seat, meal etc. Those are the things helping Cathay to present their service. The first image to customers is very important, the freight attendances wear the smart uniform. The customers may think they are professional. It helps the staffs to deliver or present the service to customers become more success. If the seats are dirty and cannot make the customer sit comfortable, maybe influence the customers’ perception and the next purchase. The company should decide how to present the service to customers is the best way, professional, smart or home sweet home' Different presentation may affect the purchasing willingness. It is because customers would like to know what is the product look like before purchase. Customer experience of Ocean Pack Ocean Pack is not a worldwide company, but it is the only local theme pack in Hong Kong. So it is important to know why can it become a world famous, even the head count ranking is higher than Hong Kong Disneyland. Service “Service cannot be touched or viewed, so it is difficult for clients to tell in advance what they will be getting.” (Sheila Webber, 2001, http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/marketing/services.htm) Intangibility is hard to define price. Service is intangible, customers cannot see but can feel. At Ocean Pack, service is everywhere, ticket selling, beverage, crown or the people wearing animal costume. Those seems are tangible but they are just are media used to present service. “The service is being produced at the same time that the client is receiving it.” (Sheila Webber, 2001, http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/marketing/services.htm) Inseparability means the service can’t be separate within one company, for example, Sally search the ticket price though Ocean Pack website. In this action, Sally was involved in the service process and the website is set up by the employees. Also, if Sally buys tickets online, there is obviously interaction between Sally and Ocean Pack’s employees. Both online service and the ticket selling service are simultaneous. “Unused capacity cannot be stored for future use.” (Sheila Webber, 2001, http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/marketing/services.htm) Perishability is telling that if there is a spare seat at Ocean Theater at Ocean Pack, it cannot be saved up until the next show. It is because the seats demand was fixed and can’t be changed. Service can’t be resold and stored. And other example, the ticket seller serve people when people come to buy ticket, the service is base on supply and demand, as the seller won’t keep supplying service even no customers using the service. “There is a strong possibility that the same enquiry would be answered slightly differently by different people.” (Sheila Webber, 2001, http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/marketing/services.htm) Variability is mainly for employees, different employees have different characters, their service delivery may depend on the characters. For instant, Sally meets a ticket seller who loves to talk and smile, he may tells Sally “Have a good day, enjoy!” with a big smile. He brings happy mood to Sally after she gets into Ocean Pack. Under this theory, the quality of service is uncontrollable, to minimize, Ocean Pack can give training to employees or set the standard for them. The above four service characteristics are important as they are affecting the service quality directly Service quality and employees behaviors Dimentions [pic] (Cape Consulting Ltd, 2001) “Service quality is a focused evaluation that reflects the customer’s perception of specific dimensions of service.” (Zenithaml & Bitner, 2003, 85) The effect of employee behaviors on service quality mainly decided by 5 dimensions which are reliability, responsibility, assurance, empathy and tangibles. “Reliability is how the company are performing and completing their promised service, quality and accuracy within the given set requirements between the company and the customer.” (Downwindz, 2010) If one of the machines in Ocean Pack need to repair and the notice noted that it will reopen a week later, Ocean Pack must enable their promise, fix it within a week. It is more important than how the new machines interesting and fun as customers want to count on Ocean Pack. Therefore, it is important to make service reliable. To enable the promise, employees are the main role to keep the promise. They have the responsibility to fix the machine on time to fulfill customers’ needs. “The willingness of the company to help its customers in providing them with a good, quality and fast service.” (Downwindz, 2010) Companies should have a basic responsibility to provide standard quality service to customers. However this is not good enough, as responsiveness need companies respond quickly and instantly. For example, Ocean Pack has a customer service department which handle the email from the website and phone calls that answer all questions and complains from customers over the world. It is one of the solutions to provide service rapidly, another solution is colleting the comments on-site and response immediately. To do the above things, employees should understand the company structure and it can help employees have the immediately feedback to customers.