Why Marketing Is Becoming a Service

Abstract

The traditional understanding of service by companies is as follows. The senior management responsible for service developed the so-called Service Level Agreements. These can be valid for their own staff or for external service providers. They stipulated, for example, on which days a customer service center is available (e.g., from 9.00 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Friday; often explicitly not at weekends or on public holidays) and what the hours of business are. In addition, it was defined for the agents in the customer service centers, for example, how long a call had to last and which text blocks are to be used for customer correspondence. Whether this motivation corresponded with the needs of the customers or their customer value (cf. Chap. 5) was frequently not brought up or not sufficiently dealt with. The result of this was a situation as can be seen in Fig. 8.1. The company sees itself as a conductor—and the customers accept the services the way they are offered—or they simply don’t.