ServiceFriday: Achieving Service Convenience and Satisfaction – What Your Customers Want

How can service providers link convenience to customer satisfaction in order to drive profitability? Research in the Journal of Service Marketing found that search convenience is the most important dimension of overall customer satisfaction.

Search convenience means that customers want to find their desired products with little to no effort. Taking that into account, one strategy is for service providers to release customers from the burden of choice and to provide them with an optimized assortment of options. “Our results highlight the importance of an optimized rather than maximized assortment because search convenience has the greatest impact on overall perceptions of service
convenience. Service providers therefore need to emphasize assortment management and address such problems as overwhelming product features (Thompson et al., 2005), consumer confusion in the face of wide assortments (Schweizer et al., 2006), and choice deferral (Iyengar and Lepper, 2000).”

Also, an efficient store layout and ready support from sales personnel who can provide adequate information quickly is an effective way for companies to reach a high level of search convenience. In the case of online retailers, it is recommended that they fuel the customer demand for search convenience by providing personal shopping, concierge services, or comparison sites to their customers in order to increase satisfaction.

Another element highly valued by customers is something called transaction convenience, which happens at the point of checkout. Service providers should make sure to minimize the time a customer needs to spend at the cashier by adequately training checkout clerks, and reducing the time a customer spends in order to reach a cashier.

Also crucial to satisfaction is the ability to provide decision convenience to a customer. Service providers can achieve this by providing enough information to their customers via their websites, advertisements, catalogs, and so forth. This helps to enable consumers to make decisions and form opinions before visiting the corresponding brick and mortar store to make their purchases.

To access the article in the Journal of Service Marketing, visit Emerald Insight at this link: https://bit.ly/2IYjdRJ (A fee may apply.)