Course content

The course provides insight into service management and relationship marketing, two disciplines with much in common. The focus is on service businesses performing customer service and their service employees. It is a goal to create an understanding of sustainable service quality, designed by the company and experienced by the customer in interaction with the company's service staff and systems. The subject is based on market orientation and customer insight, that enables the firm to deliver within the customer's tolerance zone and exceed expectations. Furthermore, in interactions between employees and customers (the moment of truth), mistakes can occur that requires service recovery. Through communication and relationship marketing, the company and its employees can bind the customers and create trust, connection, repurchase, increased willingness to pay and positive talk about the company and its services. The course focuses on both conventional services and electronic services, made possible through technology, digitalization, automation and the internet.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:

The student will acquire knowledge of how service companies, through their customer market strategies and investments in market orientation can deliver within the customers' tolerance zone and meet the customers' expectations. An understanding of how service recovery can be reduced, and how the company's employees influence service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty will be developed. Furthermore, knowledge about how the company can develop and maintain relationships with suppliers, employees and customers, as well as knowledge of theories used to understand relationship marketing, will be developed. Acquired knowledge about the company's adaptation to changes in external and internal environments to ensure profitable service businesses, as well as insights into what listening is and how communication strategies affect trust as well as how and when the service company's reputation affects customer loyalty will be emphasized.

Skills:

The student shall be able to develop strategies for recruiting service personnel and strategies for training and continuous relationship-specific investments in service employees and customers. They will master how the company, through investments in service quality, can influence customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and profitability. Understand the process of introduction, development, maintenance and termination of relationships with suppliers, employees and customers. Students must have a thorough understanding of mistakes, service recovery and its consequences.

General competence:

The student shall acquire competence that makes the individual a resource for service businesses, through developing analytical skills in the exercise of service management and relationship marketing in general. Develop knowledge about how sustainability, technological innovations, automation and digital transformation affect companies' service quality, relationship quality, customer relations and profitability.

Learning methods and activities

Lectures, discussions, student group-work.

Specific conditions

Recommended previous knowledge

Introduction to marketing, strategy and organization.

Course materials

Wilson, Alan, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Mary Jo Bitner Dwayne D. Gremler (2021), Service Marketing, Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm, Fourth Edition, McGraw-Hill.

Palmatier, Robert and Lena Steinhoff (2019), Relationship Marketing in the Digital Age, 1st Edition, Routledge.

Credit reductions