Answer to Question #128273 in Marketing for Nancy Owusu-Ansah

Question

Discouraging abusive and opportunistic customer behavior

Answer 1

Discouraging Abuse and Opportunistic Customer Behavior

Addressing the Challenge of Jaycustomers

•

Jaycustomer: A customer who behaves in a thoughtless or abusive fashion, causing

problems for the firm, its employees, and other customers

•

More potential for mischief in service businesses, especially when many customers are

present

•

No company wants an ongoing relationship with an abusive customer. There are seven types of Jaycustomers: The Cheat and Thief

1.The Cheat: thinks of various way to cheat the firm.

2.The Thief: He/she has no intention of paying for goods,but out to steal or pay less services lend themselves to clever schemes to avoid payment

e.g., bypassing electricity meters, circumventing TV cables, riding free on public transportation

Firms must take preventive actions

against thieves, but make allowances

for honest but absent-minded

customers

Seven Types of Jaycustomers: The Rulebreaker

•

Many services need to establish rules to guide customers safely through the service

encounter

•

Government agencies may impose rules for health and safety reasons

•

Some rules protect other customers from dangerous behavior

e.g. ski patrollers issue warnings to reckless skiers by attaching orange stickers on their lift.

The Belligerent

•Expresses resentment, abuses service employees verbally or even physically

•Confrontations between customers and service employees can easily escalate

•Firms should ensure employees have skills to deal with difficult situations in a public place.

Machine-based instructions: The company can use some machine based

instructions to teach the customer about the services so that the customers can

know about the services that the company provides.

Customers as Co-Producers: Levels of Participation in Service

Production

 Low – Employees and systems do all the work

 Medium – Customer inputs required to assist provider

 Provide needed information, instructions

 Make personal effort

 May share physical possessions

 High – Customer works actively with provider to co-produce the service

As mobile industry is high customer involvement because the customer have to take the

service by themselves so at GP customer involvement is very high. The customer will

bye the connection and they will activate the SIM by themselves then they have to make

the phone call by them self. Most the service of the GP the customer have to take my

themselves.

Service Firms as Teachers: Well-trained Customers Perform Better

 Firms must teach customers roles as co-producers of service: The GP have to

teach the customer how to call or how to take the services. Sometimes they have to

open outlet only to teach the customer in somewhere or contacting over the phone call.

The Grameenphone gives the instruction to the customer to take the services by calling

at different numbers.

Customers need to know how to achieve best results: Sometimes the customer

need to know some information about the services to have the best services. Customer

need to know the way of using services so that they can extract the full benefits of

services.

Education can be provided through:

Brochures: The service companies provides some brochures or catalog where

some information is given for the customer that can educate them in using the

services . From the brochures a customer can know how to use the services

products and how to extracts the full benefits of services. GP provides brochures

with the SIM connection or some brochures are given to the customer about the

services, from where the customer can know how to activate the SIM and how to

have the information about the different customer services or promotion.