Service Marketing Strategy example essay topic

Service marketing strategies are widely used by different service providers. Depending on unique service characteristic it is very important to define appropriate strategy and ways of managing business in travel industry. This industry is very profitable, especially for Republic of Kazakhstan, and attracting more customers from foreign countries and meeting their expectations are main tasks for country's marketers. Lets take Kazakhstan Company - Ark.

It functionate's in tourism and travel industry. Ark Company is a Kazakhstan private company established in 1995. It currently employs a staff of 38 experienced specialists and has office spaces in downtown Almaty and Pavlodar City. The major activity is creating a tourism infrastructure and organizing group and individual tours to the Kazakh part of the Great Silk Road. Ark Company offers a wide range of services in the area of tourism: visa support and registration, transportation, translation, accommodation in hotels, a large selection of tours in Almaty and its outskirts. It arranges various types of tours, including business, recreational and hunting tours, for incoming foreign travelers.

Regarding the business tours, company's office equipped with all necessary reservation and business systems to work as Travel Agency. Ark Company can offer the following Corporate Travel Services: domestic and international air tickets, hotels in Almaty with negotiated rates by the direct contracts. (The Regent, Hyatt Regency, Astana, Otra r, Dost yk and many others with the lower class), hotels in the other regions of Kazakhstan, car rental and transfers, VIP services, airport meet and greet, assistance in organizing conferences and meetings, sightseeing, excursions. The company owns a recreation center 'Arktur' near Ala kol Lake, a tourist center in Almaty region and a guest's lodge in a beautiful ravine on the territory of Ile-Ala tau National Park. Besides the services in the field of tourism the Company has a subsidiary that provides railway freight forwarding services in Kazakhstan, CIS and abroad. The company works on the local (60 percent), regional (30 percent), and international (10 percent) markets.

It is experienced in doing business internationally and possesses cooperation contracts with travel companies in Turkey, Latvia and China. There are a lot of different concepts using by service marketers, but their correct usage will appreciably improve Ark Company image. After successful implementing of the following it should try to find another strategies corresponding to traveling industry characteristics: 1. Service innovations.

Services are usually defined by a limited number of constitutive characteristics: a) its lack of materiality; b) the concomitance of service creation and consumption; c) the integration of an external factor in the service creation can be viewed as central characteristic identifying service. As a direct consequence of these specific services attributes, the consumer's ability to evaluate a service a priori is limited and evaluations are mainly based on consumption experiences. As to service innovations this is not possible because no experience exist. In exhibit #1 we can see that customers' buying decision in favor of an innovative service determine its market success. Customers' buying decisions are based on information about existence and quality of the new service, which are transmitted via the service provider's communication activities or non-company communication. In this general framework of service innovations's uccess is applied to a single service sector, traveling.

For Ark Company it is suitable to present absolutely new types of service, for example: extreme trips in Kazakhstani mountains, but it should create approximate customer's expectations about this type of service. 2. Incentive-compatible pricing. Customer always ignores effect of his choice on the delay costs incurred by other customers and chooses a lower effort level, resulting in a smaller service rate.

Although customers are homogeneous with all the characteristics known to the facility manager, a moral hazard problem arises because effort level and service rate are neither observable nor verifiable ex-post. To provide incentives for customers to speed up, one obvious way for Ark Company is to charge a price that is increasing in the observed service time. This variable price should be high enough to induce the customers to choose the net-value maximizing service rate. 3. Measuring service quality.

It is important for Ark Company to have efficient conception of its service quality that is based on a comparison between what the customer fells should be offered and what is provided. The difference between expected and perceived service is termed Gap 5. This customer-perceived service quality shortcoming, Gap 5, is the result of four service provider shortfalls. The measurement of Gap 5 has been operational ized in the form of SERVQUAL, a two-part instrument.

The first part, consisting of 22 questions for measuring expectations, is benchmark ed in terms of the performance of an excellent provider of the service being studied. Asking respondents to compare their organizations to an excellent service provider is the frame established in the generic version of SERVQUAL. The second part, also containing 22 questions, measures perceptions by framing questions in terms of the actual service provider - Ark Company. 4. Signaling theory. Customers have difficulty evaluating service quality prior to consumptions since most services are high in experience or credence attributes.

Exhibit # 2 illustrates the cognitive psychological effects and non-monetary economic outcomes resulting from the use of different guarantee types under conditions of high and low bond credibility. 5. The SERVQUAL instrument. Due to the growth of outsourcing and other alternative mechanisms by which companies are meeting their need for information systems service inside the company, managers are concerned about improving the perceived service quality of IS function. In recent years, the use of SERVQUAL-based instruments has become increasingly popular. It is necessary for Ark Company to use this instrument, because it can suggest it's ervice through internet, for example web-site web with facilities to view, compare and order different traveling packages, and SERVQUAL will be the best variant to check whether the service is appropriate for customers.

Service marketing issues are very vital nowadays, and each company, especially in young Kazakhstani market should try to use them correctly in order to attract customers inside local market or even from abroad. Service marketing strategy is constantly developing and it should be better for Ark Company to adopt its concepts as quickly as it possible. 1. General framework for service innovations's uccess. 2. A signaling theory framework for the effects of guarantees.

Bibliography

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44, Part 1, pp. : 1623-1636.2. Watson, Richard T., Leyland F. Pitt, Bruce Kav an, "Measuring Information Systems Service Quality: Lessons from Two Longitudinal Case Studies", MIS Quarterly, Vol. 22, No 1, pp. : 195-208.3. Kash yap, Rajiv, 2001, "The Effects of Service Guarantees on External and Internal Markets", Academy of Marketing Science review, No 10, pp.
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