Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence

Andy Fryett

Andy Fryett

I excel in solving business challenges and delivering unparalleled customer service.

Published Dec 17, 2020

When I worked at Nokia, we ran a program of Service Culture training for all customer services staff in the UK organization, including the people in marketing, network planning, installation & commissioning, technical support, and customer training. It was centered around the criteria customers use to evaluate service quality: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but we formed an acronym from those four words: R.A.R.E. This led to the phrase used as the title for this piece. See what we did there? Clever!

What was not so clever was the employee competition we held to design mugs and mouse mats to promote the program in the organization. Again, my memory fails me - I can’t remember who won - but I do remember that we learned the hard way how important it is to review designs carefully before starting manufacture. Can you see how putting the words “Nokia” and “Good customer service is R.A.R.E.” together might send an unintended message?

Apart from that mis-step, the program was very successful and the four criteria have stuck with me through my career: generally, a customer expects their service provider to be reliable, to give assurance, to be responsive and empathetic. Recently, I started thinking about where that program had come from, and Google helped me out (other search engines are available). Searching those terms led me to Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, by V. A. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and L. L. Berry, published in 1990.

The book describes the authors’ research and offers a model that managers can use to understand and improve service quality for their customers. Their SERVQUAL tool uses five, not four, dimensions to record customer perceptions of service quality:

• Reliability - The ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately.
• Responsiveness - The willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.
• Assurance - The knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence.
• Empathy - The caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers.
• Tangibles - The appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communications materials.

The authors carried out hundreds of interviews across several service sectors, and the respondents rated reliability as the most critical dimension and tangibles the least. So, the most important thing is to do what you say you are going to do.

They take the concept further, giving guidance on how to get started on the service improvement journey. They’ve identified four potential causes of service quality shortfalls by the provider: not knowing what customers expect; having the wrong service quality standards; having a gap between the service specification and actual service delivery; and a gap between what the firm promises and delivers.

The final chapter looks at the main service challenges, as they were then:

• Designing quality into the service, e.g. service blueprinting;
• Making technology a servant, e.g. using technology to support the service strategy;
• Attacking the labor shortfall;
• Raising our service aspirations.

There only seems to be one edition of the book. Does anyone know if the authors, or others, took their ideas further? Are the SERVQUAL tool and the RARE(T) dimensions now obsolete? And do you think that the service challenges for the 2020s are the same as they were at the time this book was published, or are we facing something new?