CROSSROADS

RAJIB KUMAR

Will the service business in India lose out to the service experience?

Despite the phenomenal growth of the service industry in India over the last some years, the basic awareness of service management among the people resource of sector affiliates is dismal.

Each of us has had our share of murky experiences with our service providers: be it cellular services, restaurants, banking services or tour operators and on a full range of issues: problem assessment, abnormal lead times for execution of requests, and erroneous billing to name a few.

Service Providers in India operate bereft of the basic commandant that services should not just aim to meet customer expectations but must also exceed the same. Alas, service providers in India -even those with “high brand equity” barely end up with service levels of 70% on a consistent basis.

World over, the intangibility and other service characteristics like direct organizational-customer relationship and high perishability of service products make achieving a consistent and competitive service difficult.

Further, services being a people centric model, cultural issues in the country stifle efforts to realize our full potential in the industry. On the contrary, the across-the- board systems approach in the West facilitates the process of making service measurability easier to implement and therefore offers service providers a framework akin (if not exactly) to quality control tests of a manufacturing unit.

While Service Quality and its assessment continue to be an elusive construct in view of variables like customer perception and expectation in the judgement (along with both an objective and subjective component involved) services can still be measured by the levels of interaction, customisation and labour intensity.

Indian service providers need to do considerable work of educating its people resource and equipping them with relevant skills in this regard. Academic Curriculum has in recent times responded to this dynamic but the gap is as phenomenal as the growth of the sector. Before consumers reinforce their paranoid about anything connected to “service” to an irreversible paradigm, its time industry decides to stand up and get counted.

The service business in India might just lose out to the service experience otherwise