There are many different kinds of service and they demand the full spectrum of research activities. In this section we will consider some of the rather specific kinds of research that are only applicable to services.

Shopping surveys

Shopping surveys are related to retailing and to service marketing where there is a mingling of customers (hotels, motels, restaurants and the like). In a shopping survey, a field worker poses as a customer and, following a list of predefined steps, makes mental notes. The shopper may simply note what aspects of delivery were or were not delivered. In addition, he or she may note the quality or rating of delivery. Major users of such surveys may be retailers such as fast food outlets and hotels. Here are some of the aspects typically covered (both for the organisation and its major competitors):

• product or service quality

• facility quality in various aspects

• personnel courtesy

• personnel efficiency

• personnel service

• personnel promotion of selected brands, items, features, benefits

• items stocked, offered, on display

• prices.

Such studies are generally handled by an outside specialist firm. There are three reasons. First, impartiality: the outside firm has no pre-formed dispositions. Second, skill: it can assist in determining what has to be checked and how to check it. Third, there is much less chance of the shopper being detected by the employees, since it is most unlikely that any employee would know the individual.

Customised, full-scale studies of service satisfaction

Some marketing research firms are offering customised, full-scale studies to provide measurement of customer reactions to the delivery of service. This is a continuing service aimed at firms that have continuing and ‘formal’ service satisfaction systems (i.e. where consumer reactions funnel into a single central location). It is used to conduct a day-after telephone interview with the customer to measure reaction while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind. Because of the day-after telephone feature, the service has particular value to utility, financial and healthcare organisations.

Other customer/client reaction research studies

Studies of customer/client reaction are often used by small-scale retailers or service firms as well as by the larger firms. They are typically do-it-yourself research projects.

DECEPTIVE APPEARANCE

There always seems to be at least one moving walkway out of order at London’s Heathrow Airport. When I asked Sir John Egan, chief executive of BAA, the owner of Heathrow, why this should be, he said it was because so many people used them. But help was at hand, he said. BAA was empowering its engineers to fix the walkways as they broke down. The night I arrived to catch a flight, the engineers had apparently used their new empowerment to go to the pub. Not only was there a dysfunctional walkway, there was also something unpleasant smeared on the ground outside the airport’s third terminal.

The check-in area was strewn with litter, while the gents’ toilets were flooded and the hand towels needed replacing. The lines of passengers waiting to have their hand luggage X-rayed were long because only a few security machines were in use. The carpet in the security area was dirty. A short distance away, however, on the other side of the machines, we could see a glittering world of plenty. Swatch and Burberry signs twinkled at us from Heathrow’s shops, like a glimpse of cold war West Berlin from the wrong side of the Wall. I am not the only one to have noticed the contrast between the public areas and the shops at the world’s busiest international airport.