It has been a pleasure to learn from one of the most humble, intellectual, informed, patient and passionate professors at IE – Teresa Recio. Her love for the subject (Services Marketing) and desire to inspire youngsters is so organic. Here are some key takeaways from her class:
Every business is a service business. There is always an intangible component in an offering. Your job is to make it tangible by giving it a face
Because of the intangibility, perish-ability and heterogeneity, we need 3 more P’s in the marketing mix: People, Process and Physical Evidence
Being customer-centric is different from being customer friendly. The former means treating them as partners in order to serve them best
Satisfaction is a function of what customers expect versus what they get. Managing expectations is as important as deliver the service
Customer loyalty is different from customer retention. In some cases, it isn’t valuable to have loyalty programs to retain customers that may gradually extract unreasonably high value out of your offering
Measure measure measure. No matter how beautiful the strategy, go back to the drawing board and see how it played out
There is nothing more satisfying than being able to jump the queue. If you can facilitate that for a class of customers that can pay a premium (without annoying the others), it is incredible