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Presents real‐life and day‐to‐day examples of service delivery problems which will be familiar to all readers. Then provides practical re‐engineering solutions to remedy the problems. The vignettes illustrating the problems are all real‐life cases based on the experiences of the authors, and the solutions they propose are also based on their encounters with service providers as educators and consultants, and talks to business audiences by both parties.

The objective of this study was to empirically test a model of relationships among service quality, satisfaction and selected behavioural outcomes. Particular attention was paid to delineating the cognitive aspects of the service provider‐consumer relationship from the affective, emotive factors. Using doctor‐patient relationships in Turkey as the study setting, results of a LISREL analysis suggest that the affective aspects of satisfaction have more impact than cognitive factors on patients’ propensity to continue the relationship. The most critical managerial implication of the study findings is that doctors need to place more emphasis on the functional (how it is done) aspects of care giving than the technical (what is done) ones.

Reports on the results and managerial implications of a Turkish study which investigated relationships between service quality, and customer satisfaction, complaint behaviour and commitment. Concludes that the ultimate success of any service quality programme implemented by a bank can only be gauged by creation and retention of satisfied customers. The role of customer‐contact personnel in the attainment of these goals is of paramount importance. Therefore, in their efforts to deliver high quality services to their external publics (i.e. clients), banks should not ignore the specific needs of their internal publics, notably their customer‐contact employees.

Correspondence analysis is a data analysis technique for the graphical display of contingency tables and multivariate categorical data. Describes the technique and illustrates its application in assessing the images of banks. Discusses the implications of the empirical study.

This paper seeks to investigate the reasons why, in an increasingly competitive health care milieu, patients choose certain hospitals over others. It introduces the modified importance‐performance analysis technique and presents the method and findings of an empirical study which applied importance‐performance analysis in a health care setting. The strategies derived from the study findings are discussed.

Ninety‐four per cent of the bankers who responded to a recent survey think that establishing a sales culture is very important to their institution’s success, yet less than half had actually instituted even the most rudimentary reforms. This article outlines the reasons which make the transition to a sales culture imperative, describes the basic features of organizational culture in general and sales culture in particular, and presents seven best practices that facilitate the painstaking process of transition to a sales culture in banks. The strategies discussed increase sales per employee, improve cross‐selling to high‐value customers, and enable banks to focus on solving customer needs to the mutual benefit of both parties. It requires providing consistently excellent service quality and sales and customer interaction training for all boundary‐spanning employees.

Focusses attention on service value as a construct which may help explain consumer decision making; however, to date this attention has been largely conceptual. Finds from the results of two empirical studies that models of consumer decision‐making which include service value explain significantly more variance in purchase intentions than models which include only service quality or cost factors, and the means by which consumers form service value perceptions is best depicted as a cognitive addition process.

Using primary care physicians, automobile mechanics and hairstylists as the analysed industries, highlights the importance of relationships in the marketing of services. Two key relationship variables, trust and affective commitment, are the focal points for the empirical study. The data suggest that the higher the level of trust and affective commitment in a customer service‐provider relationship, the greater the probability that the consumer will continue the relationship, and the lower the level of perceived risk inherent in the relationship. Also, the findings suggest that females seek more trust and commitment than do males within the service‐provider/customer relationship, and consumers in general place more trust in and are more committed to their doctor and their hairstylist than to their mechanic.

Because services cannot be stored, temporary imbalances between supply and demand present a difficult challenge for managers of service firms. Though marketing and management strategies for dealing with foreseen disequilibrium situations are discussed, focuses primarily on stratagems for dealing with situations where demand or supply fluctuations are not foreseen. Discusses two categories of strategies: foresee the unforeseen by improving market intelligence; and lessen the intensity of the negative consequences of supply/demand disequilibriums by increasing flexibility and sharing risks.