Question

what are the four characteristics of services? Explain a time you had bad service and another time you good service. Did you still go back to the place that you received bad service? What did the place do to provide you with good service?.

Answer 1

The four important characteristics of services are as follows:

1. Intangibility - Services cannot be felt, heard, touched, tasted, seen or smelled.
2. Inseparability - This means that services are created and consumed at the same time.
3. Perishability - They cannot be stored for later consumption.
4. Variability - The quality of services varies greatly on factors such as who is providing the service, to whom, where, reason for rendering services, and so on.

Once, I had been inefficient in providing timely service in form of offer for a prestigious project to a new customer. As a result, the customer finalized with another competing firm. In process, I lost opportunity to win the order and claim the success. This would have been advantageous to my organization as well as my own career. However, I approached the customer later and requested to consider us for forthcoming projects. He obliged by providing us the inquiry details for further projects, for which I completed and submitted quotation on time and with best technicalities and prices.

An example of providing good services to clients includes an instance when I could ensure that my commissioning engineer attended to a customer complaint immediately and resolved the issues which had arisen due to inappropriate material handling. He trained the supervisors of the customer company to ensure they can reboot the system on their own, if required. Thus caused customer satisfaction to increase. I could then approach the client for further project requirements in current as well as other plant locations.