What is the marketing impact of a well-designed service guarantee? A well-designed service guarantee can bring a positive marketing impact. Obviously, it can increase current customer’s satisfaction and build a long-term relationship with them. It also can attract new potential customers with a good name in the special field or industry. Evaluate the design of Accellion’s guarantee shown in Exhibit 1. How effective will it be in communicating service excellence to potential and current customers? Would you recommend any changes to its design or implementation?
Acccellion’s Service Guarantee is incorporated in to Accellion’s Customer Contract. There are performance guarantee, availability guarantee, customer service guarantee in case of the failure of performance and availability. There is also security and privacy policy in the guarantee statement. So it is clear and effective in communicating service excellence to customers. I would recommend to omit the part of “with 5 days from the date such failure occurred ”. There should not be any limit time about customer notice.
Normally, if the failure is not too bad, customer will not notice the supplier until the failure occurs again and again. Here should imply to encourage customer to notice any failure any time. Otherwise, many failures add up will end up losing this customer. The other thing I would say is, as a part of a contract, they should add up crediting the customer’s account with some amount by any chance of the failure of security and privacy. The guarantee is only from Accellion. Will the guarantee be successful in creating a culture for service excellence within Accellion?
What else may be needed for achieving such a culture? Only one guarantee is not working in creating a culture for service excellence anywhere. There are a lot of relative work to do to make it successful. Firstly, there should be training class or process for every employee to let them know the importance of the service excellence. Secondly, there should be a system of rewords and penalties. Rewarding the employee who do a great or excellent job and punishing the ones who fail to the service will encourage employees work harder and try their best to avoid failure.
Thirdly, Accellion should build a Quality Management Department/Team to monitor and evaluate the quality of their service and recover anything wrong at the earliest time. Finally, a service excellence culture can not be built in one day. It needs a long-term practice among all employees -from the top leaders to frontline employees. Everyone needs to take efforts to make it. Do you think customers might take advantage of this guarantee and “stage” service failures to invoke the guarantee? If yes, how could Accellion minimize potential cheating on its guarantee?
Yes, I think customers might take advantage of this guarantee. But customers might seldom invoke the guarantee in the “stage” service failures. In reality, company like Accellion will recover the failure or fix any occurred problem as soon as possible. Then customers will not claim the service fee. As a service company, to retain its customers, Accellion should take actions to avoid cheating on its guarantee. I strongly recommend it builds a system or channel for customers to report or warn any failure or problem, best before these failures or problems occur.
