Service Encounter at Excellent Laundry Services - Assignment Example

The success of Excellent Laundry Services could have not been achieved without proper management of service encounters experienced in the past. Service Encounters of the Third Kind is presently employed by an Excellent company. According to Kaufman (1999), “In Service Encounters of the Third Kind, your company welcomes the customer in a manner completely different from the standardized "What do you want?" or customized "How do you want it?" Instead, your company looks to the customer with sincerity, interest, and patience, and asks the somewhat unlikely question: "What do you want to become?"

            The normal day of operation for Excellent starts from 7:00 AM. to 7:00 PM. Once laundries get into the station, these are claimable after 24 hours (except for the special rush services with doubled service charge). Excellent has two types of customers: (1) those that leave their laundry in the station, and (2) those who claim they're done laundry. The first type of customer walks into the receiving section, hands in the bag of laundry to the receptionist, discusses customer specifications and billing, and leaves the area. The second type of customer walks into the releasing section to claim the laundry with the usual behavior of opening the laundry bag, critically smelling and touching their done clothes, checking the items for completeness, and paying the counter for the service charge. Both customers receive courteous treatment and proper accommodation with a big smiles from the Excellent employees.

            To trace back service encounters managed during the past operation, here are the three typical employee-customer encounters. One, a customer complained of dissatisfaction with a frowning face and expressed that her clothes do not smell good and are not soft. Two, a customer complained that she wants privacy from other customers when she lays down all her clothes and gives specific instructions to the receptionist on how her laundry should be handled. Three, a customer complained that he wants his pants fully ironed, without a line in the center, and that he does not want his uniform to be scented as it mixes with the scent of his perfume. Of the three particular scenarios, the standard procedure done by the team member was to acknowledge the customer’s feeling of disappointment, apologized, thank him/her for the feedback, and assured him/her that complaints were noted and that we will do something about it.

            It was found that personalization of service per customer was the smartest management technique applicable because every customer has his/her personal preference as to how his/her clothes be treated. All complaints were logged into the system for reference of each customer’s specifications and these were then passed on to all employees from the receptionist to the washer, ironer, dry cleaner, and lastly to the laundry releasing staff for final checking if the demands for quality of service were met. The complaint on privacy in transacting business was managed by providing a nontransparent closed-door receiving area where customers were accommodated one at a time. Being more pleasant and sincere to the customers was emphasized to the receptionists and laundry releasing staff and they were trained to ask the customers for specifications/preferences to meet customer satisfaction. To finally achieve a zero negative feedback goal, the management required all employees to master the handling of all kinds of fabrics as washing, ironing, dry-cleaning, etc. This may sound rigid and meticulous, but just easy to follow eventually in daily routine business activity.