Want to Perfect Your Company’s Service?Use Behavioral Science

Summarized by,Anubhav VanmaliSharadkumar R BhattSiddharth Anand

Richard B. Chase & Sriram Dasu

Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore

Introduction

• Examining Service Encounters from the customer’s point of view

• The feelings that customers experience during these encounters

• Insights from behavioral science into better service management

• Translating these into operating principles for service-encounter management

Applied Behavioral Science

• In any service encounter – from a simple pizza pickup to a complex, long-term consulting engagement-

“perception is reality”

Sequence Effects

• When people recall experiences, they remember snapshots, not movies

• Experiences are assessed based upon: Trend in the sequence of

pain/pleasure The high & low points The ending

• They pay attention to the rate of improvement in a sequence

Duration Effects

• People who are mentally engaged in a task don’t notice how long it takes

• They overestimate the time elapsed• Increasing the number of segments in

an encounter lengthens its perceived duration

• Unless an activity is much longer or much shorter than expected, people pay little attention to its duration

• The pleasurable content & how it is arranged dominate assessments

Rationalization Effects

• Counterfactual Thinking/ Second-guessing People desperately want things to make

sense If there’s no handy explanation, they’ll

concoct one• People:

• View the likely cause as a discrete thing• Conclude that deviations from rituals/norms

caused the unexpected• Tend to ascribe credit/ blame to individuals,

not systems (Put a human face on the problem)

Principle 1 : Finish Strong

• The end is far more important because it remains in the customer’s recollections

• People’s innate preference for improvement

• Examples:-• Commercial websites• Consulting: Schedule the project so

that a golden nugget or two appear at the end of the engagement

• Airlines: Focus on the last encounter- Baggage Collection

Principle 2 : Get the Bad Experiences Out of the Way Early

• People prefer to have undesirable events come first- so they can avoid dread- and to have desirable events come at the end- so they can savor them

• Unfortunately, service providers dread delivering bad news, so they delay it until the last possible moment - Exactly the wrong thing to do

Principle 3 : Segment the Pleasure, Combine the Pain

• Gambling - Prefer winning $5 twice over $10 once

• Clinics – Let patients spend more time in waiting room so they don’t have to endure a second, third or fourth wait in the examining rooms

• Service companies should cut the number of steps to reach the final destination, thereby reducing the pain of waiting Trade Shows Disney’s Theme Parks ( Two 90 Sec

rides better than One 3 min ride)

Both halves of the principle:

Principle 4 : Build Commitment Through Choice

• People are happier and more comfortable when they believe they have some control over a process, particularly an uncomfortable one

• Patients, when involved in decisions, feel less helpless, less hopeless & more committed to making the process work

• Hotels – Alarm clock vs. Wake-up call• Xerox Servicing - Choice over schedule

Principle 5 : Give People Rituals, and Stick to Them

• Rituals are used to mark key moments in the relationship, establish professional credentials, set expectations, and get feedback

• “McKinsey grunt—uh-huh, uh-huh”• Not getting the weekly call from the

consultant on a project, not copying the CEO on a progress report, not returning phone calls immediately – any of these lapses can be blamed after the fact for a failure

The Right Remedy

Process-based remedies should be applied to process-based problems and outcome-based remedies should be applied to outcome-based problems

Conclusion

• Service encounters can be engineered to enhance the customer’s experience during the process and his/ her recollection of the process after it is completed

• Behavioral science, applied with equal doses of empathy and imagination, can improve service delivery It can change the impressions that

your customers remember

Thank You!