Service Encounter Journal and Paper Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is for you to understand and evaluate service encounters from your perspective as a customer. We all have a number of such encounters each week, including (but not limited to) restaurants, banks, airlines, dry cleaners, doctors, dentists, libraries, travel agencies, phone companies, and auto mechanics.
During the first part of the semester, you are to keep a "journal" of your service encounter experiences. The purpose of this journal is to identify sources of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with services.
Service Encounter Journal:
Journal Entries. You will complete eight journal entries. Each entry will correspond to one service encounter. Be sure and include the important details of the service encounter. This will help you in writing your service encounter paper explained below.
Try to record an assortment of encounters from a variety of service industries (i.e., don't do all restaurants), as well as some that you found satisfying and some that were very dissatisfying. Try to write up two service encounters per week, beginning right away.
Select one of your eight service experiences and use it as the basis for creating a customer journey map/customer experience map. Include the customer journey map in the appendix. Your customer journey map should show the following: your journey steps and the extent to which they were excellent or poor, key moments of truth and emotion points, as well as your experience at each point expressed visually.
Service Encounter Paper:
The purpose of the service encounter paper is to analyze service encounters from a customer's point of view. This paper, which is limited to 6 typewritten, double-spaced pages, will consist of four parts.
In the first part of the paper, write about the organization from your journal that has the worst service of any you encountered. Based on your reading of the textbook, diagnose the problem(s) with the service and then recommend the most important actions management should take to improve the service. Use concepts from the class to support your diagnosis and suggestions.
Be selective and focus on the most important issues.
In the second part of the paper, write about an organization from your journal that is doing an excellent overall job of services marketing. Again, base your analysis on the textbook. Demonstrate your knowledge of services marketing concepts by discussing what this organization does that makes it successful.
In the third part of the paper, describe your customer journey map and the insights you gained going through the process of creating it. Discuss any key issues or managerially relevant opportunities that you identified. Your map can focus on any of the 8 experiences you discussed in your journal.
In the final part of the paper, please describe the lessons you learned by addressing the following two questions:
• What did you learn from this assignment about yourself as a consumer?
• What did you learn from this assignment that will help you be a better manager?
To aid in both your diagnosis of problems and understanding of what is driving excellent service, it may help you, when possible, to spend additional time observing the service in action. You might also talk with a service manager/owner to get additional insight into the service operation from his/her point of view.
The paper will be evaluated based on the following:
• The depth and substance of your observations, your ability to diagnose probable causes of problems and match them with appropriate solutions based on material discussed in class and/or in your readings, as well as the quality of writing.
Note: Given the main purpose of this assignment is to evaluate your understanding of course concepts, be sure that you use services marketing concepts in your discussion.
Attachment:- Customer-Journey-and-Experience-Map.rar