NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SERVICE
A company must consider four (4) special service characteristics namely; intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability.
- INTANGIBILITY: This means that services cannot be seen, tested, felt, heard, or smelled before they are bought, for instance people undergoing surgery cannot see the outcome when paying for the operation or passenger traveling cannot promise that they and their luggage will arrive safely at the intended destination.
To reduce uncertainty, buyers look for “signal” of services quality, they drew conclusions about quality from the place, people, price, equipment, and communications that they can see.
- INSEPARABILITY: It means that services depends on who provide them as well as when, where and how they are provided. For example some hotels, say Transcorp Hilton have reputations for providing better service than the others. Still, within a given Transcorp Hotel, on registration counter employee may be cheerful and efficient, where as another standing just few meter away may be unpleasant and slow even the quality of a single Transcorp Hilton employee’s service varies according to his or her energy and frame of mind at the time of each customers encounter.
- PERISHABILITY: Means that service cannot be stored for later sales or use. Some doctors change patients for missed appointments because the services value existed only at that point and disappeared when the patient did not show up. The perishability of services is not a problem which demand is steady. However, when demand fluctuated, services firms often have difficulty.
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