“Service Management” has been one of the most popular modules in the NUS MBA programme. During the first round, it was oversubscribed by more than 100 students. Usually the cap of one module is around 50 people, but given the oversubscription, the professor and MBA office decided to enlarge the class to 70+ and they found a bigger classroom in the NUS Hon Sui Sen Memorial Library to accommodate all of us.
I was very lucky to have enrolled in this module during the first round of module selection as it turned out to be one of my favorite modules in the programme. This module was a 5-day intensive one, from Wednesday to Sunday, 9am to 530pm. My internship supervisor also kindly let me take leaves during the class.
The professor of Service Management is Jochen Wirtz who is also the Vice Dean of MBA Programmes. He is an expert in service marketing and published many papers and books in this area. Our required reading “Services Marketing – People, Technology, Strategy” was very informative and interesting. I really enjoy his lecture because he used many real-life examples to illustrate the theory or analysis, from his previous consulting clients, case studies, and current MBA office operation to his personal life. I was new to service management, but after taking this module, I gained a deeper understanding of it and found most of the content relevant and applicable to our current or future work.
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The five-day module was actually quite fast-paced and this kind of intensive training usually resulted in short-term memory. Thus, I would like to note down some of my key takeaways so that I can revisit them in the future.
10 Key Learning from “Service Management” module:
1. Better service will be the most effective and long-term differentiation among companies. No matter how good the products are, they will face the risk of being copied and commoditized, and ultimately confronting low-price competition.
2. Many sectors are shrinking, but three sectors are and will continue growing: education, healthcare, and leisure/hospitality.
3. A good service ecosystem relies on three pillars:
a) Marketing: branding, positioning, PR, point of sales -> to attract the right customers, satisfy them and keep them
b) Operations: design the right processes, ops, and IT, including adopting more AI, technology, automation tools -> manage them well and keep improving
c) HR: employees training, motivation and incentivization -> to attract the right employees, satisfy them and keep them. Service personnel are so important because they are in the frontline and are customers’ first touch points. Only satisfed employees can have positive service attitude and deliver good-quality service, thus bringing delight and high satisfaction to the customers.
4. Excellent service quality can bring companies higher loyalty from customers. Genuine customer loyalty is the “share of heart”: customers truly love your products and services as they create value for them. Companies should identify the ‘right’ customers they want to keep and craft a loyalty bonding approach to deepen the relationship with them.
5. Effective complaint handling and service recovery can lead to high customer retention and low churn rate. Among the recovery strategies, ‘waiving the bill’ is the most expensive one while providing other products/services vouchers is a better idea, such as providing spa vouchers, 6-month free subscriptions on the platform, etc. In this case, the customers still stay within your business and you can amaze them with better services.
6. Service should be improved and redesigned continuously to meet and exceed customers’ expectations, service standards and performance targets. Collecting customer and employee feedback is a good and important way to know the voice of customers (VOC), and create a climate for service and a culture for change.
7. Dual culture strategy: using the example of Singapore Airlines to illustrate how to have ‘cost-effective service excellence (CESE)’ in the competitive airline industry.
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| Our team presented another CESE example from Singapore Airlines: by making the passengers “Book the cook” before departure, SIA can minimize the unpredictability of passengers’ meal choices and thus reduce food waste and meal oversubscription. |
8. Focused Service Factory strategy: using the example of Shouldice Hospital to show how their focus on hernia repair can lead to high customer satisfaction and low unit costs.
9. OM strategies: given that uncertainty is the enemy of productivity and efficiency, OM strategies try to reduce the variability by cutting customer choices and customer contact and installing buffering between the front and back office. When there’s predictability, companies can standardize the input, process and output, achieving cost-saving in the end. An example is McDonald which has a standard choice of meals for customers. Another example is Google reducing customer contacts by introducing Customer Support (self-service tech) and only providing dedicated sales to serve really big accounts that spend more than a certain amount of moeny in ads per year.
10. The luxurious resorts & hotels Banyan Tree & LUX* examples demonstrate the importance of productizing the ‘experience’ and branding the service excellence!
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There were four excellent guest speakers in class. One of them was Mr. Avi Z Liran, a Chief Delighting Officer at “Delivering Delight” and an inspiring keynote speaker. His purposeful goal in life is to help organizations positively transform their workplaces and employees to be happier so that their customers will be delighted as well.
I like how he summarized the Top 7 delightful settings: ‘appreciation, care, develop/guide, kindness, play/fun, purpose, support/protect’. All of us should keep these points in mind when interacting with other employees at work.
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| Another important takeaway from Avi’s lecture is to listen to others well and carefully. Nowadays, people are often too busy to put their work or phones aside to listen to what others want to tell them. However, when asked, most people feel “being heard” is one important way to show care. One tip Avi gave us was to list down 10 things after listening to another person. Only when we listen carefully can we understand how we can help others or how others might provide useful assistance or information to us. |
At the end of the module, the prof asked us to list down commitments on how we are going to implement some of these learnings at work. I think “people” is the most important factor in service management success. In the future, I would like to create a delightful culture among the team, make everyone aware of their purpose and value at work and create a climate for service.
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| Great class from prof Jochen! 👍 |