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Want to perfect your company's service? Use behavioral science
1University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, Los Angeles, USA.
Harvard Business Review
|June 21, 2001
Summary
Understanding customer psychology is key to effective service management. Behavioral science reveals five principles to enhance service encounters, focusing on customer perception and memory for improved experiences.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral Science
- Service Management
- Psychology
Background:
- Traditional service management often overlooks the subtle psychological aspects of customer encounters.
- Existing research focuses on metrics like queuing theory and response times, neglecting customer feelings.
- Behavioral science offers novel insights into optimizing the customer experience.
Purpose of the Study:
- To translate behavioral science findings into actionable operating principles for service management.
- To enhance both the immediate experience and the lasting memory of service encounters for customers.
- To provide a framework for engineering service encounters based on psychological principles.
Main Methods:
- Application of behavioral science research findings.
- Development of five core operating principles for service encounter design.
- Focus on customer perception and memory recall.
Main Results:
- Five operating principles derived from behavioral science: finish strong, get bad experiences out early, segment pleasure/combine pain, build commitment through choice, and use rituals.
- Emphasis on the disproportionate impact of the encounter's end on customer memory.
- Highlighting the preference for undesirable events preceding desirable ones.
Conclusions:
- Customer perception is the ultimate measure of service encounter success.
- Implementing these psychological principles can significantly improve customer satisfaction and memory.
- Service encounter design should prioritize the customer's subjective experience and cognitive biases.