Continuing on from your first assessment, Part B will once again be structured around Heskett’s ‘strategic service vision’ framework although your focus will be specifically on stages three and four. Your role will be to develop an ‘operating strategy’ and discuss those relevant features of the ‘service delivery system’.
In addition to the above, the following questions/tasks should be addressed:
? Productivity and quality are both key facets of the service process. Using the academic literature, explain how your organisation will balance the quality of its service whilst maximising its productivity.
? Construct a simple blueprint for one service process in your organisation.
? Select any two methods for managing capacity and explain how these could be used to better match supply and demand for a service offered by your organisation.
? Explain how your employees can affect the quality of service received by your external customer. What measurements could you use to gauge and manage the satisfaction of your employees?
? Choose any service quality model as described in Chapter 11, and analyse and apply the model to your own organisation.
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Guidelines to your Strategic Service Vision report – Part B
Once again, this assessment is designed as an experiential learning exercise by having you apply theoretical concepts to a potential real-world situation in a critical manner. Remember that you should adopt the mindset of a real business owner/investor for the organisation you have elected to base your report on.
The report should conform to the following format, and should also include a professionally laid out table of contents prior to the executive summary:
Executive summary
An executive summary of a report is just that, a summary (and is not included in your total word count for this assessment). It contains a statement of report purpose and an overview of the actual and specific findings. For this assessment, it should be no longer than one page. The summary can only be written after you have completed your report. Write in past tense (e.g. The purpose of this report was to…). If an executive summary is well written the reader should be able to understand the main points, findings, and conclusions of the actual report without having to read the full report.
Section one – Introduction
This is a brief statement of the purpose of the report, what its objectives are, and an overview of how the report is structured. To assist in continuity, you may wish to highlight key elements of Part A.
Section two – Operating strategy
As you will see from Heskett’s framework, you need to identify the important elements of the strategy although mindful of the Service Management Trinity, limit your discussion to Operations, Marketing and Human Resources. There are several ways in which you can approach this. For example, you may wish to discuss each department separately, identifying various objectives and strategy. You would then need to identify the various links between these departments with a goal of providing quality customer service. Alternatively, you might like to use Martin’s (1989) model (refer to Topic 4) as a framework for your discussion. These are suggestions however you may choose other ways to present this.
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Section three – Service blueprint
You are to prepare a service blueprint here. Once again you are limited only by your imagination. You are to identify and discuss the critical points within the service delivery process that are likely to have a significant bearing on the customer’s experience. Clarify why these points in the process are particularly important and how you would manage them.
Section four – The service delivery system
This is your opportunity to detail some of those actions that will support your strategy. Topic 2 identifies some important questions although you need to focus specifically on the following:
1. What should be the nature of the service process at each step?
2. What should be the serving protocol – reservations system, first-come, first served, or a priority system for certain types of customers?
3. Given that services are perishable, what capacity management issues do you foresee and how do you plan to address these issues.
In addition, you should address question 1, regarding productivity and quality. As each organisation will address these differently, aim to discuss the trade-offs that are relevant to your chosen organisation and seek to support this with academic literature.
Section five – Service employee management
As noted by Lovelock et al. (2014), the encounter with service staff is often the most important aspect of a service. Given this importance, it is prudent to attract and hire employees that add value and gain your organisation a competitive advantage. This can present many management issues such as training and staff retention. Discuss how your employees can affect the quality received by your customers. Furthermore, how will you gauge and manage the satisfaction of your employees.
Section six – Quality management measures
This final section will draw upon information discussed in Topic 4. Although an essential element of this section is to identify a service quality model such as that discussed in Chapter 12 of your text, you are to bring together many of the service provisions discussed previously, which will ensure the provision of quality