This presentation tries to summarize an article by Richard B. Chase & Sriram Dasu which appeared in HBR June 2001 edition.

1. Richard B. Chase & Sriram Dasu Want to Perfect Your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science Summarized by, AnubhavVanmali Sharadkumar R Bhatt Siddharth Anand Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore

2. Introduction Examining Service Encounters from the customer’s point of view The feelings that customers experience during these encounters Insights from behavioral science into better service management Translating these into operating principles for service-encounter management

3. Applied Behavioral Science In any service encounter – from a simple pizza pickup to a complex, long-term consulting engagement- “perception is reality”

5. The high & low points

6. The endingThey pay attention to the rate of improvement in a sequence

7. Duration Effects People who are mentally engaged in a task don’t notice how long it takes They overestimate the time elapsed Increasing the number of segments in an encounter lengthens its perceived duration Unless an activity is much longer or much shorter than expected, people pay little attention to its duration The pleasurable content & how it is arranged dominate assessments

9. If there’s no handy explanation, they’ll concoct onePeople: View the likely cause as a discrete thing Conclude that deviations from rituals/norms caused the unexpected Tend to ascribe credit/ blame to individuals, not systems (Put a human face on the problem)

10. Principle 1 : Finish Strong The end is far more important because it remains in the customer’s recollections People’s innate preference for improvement Examples:- Commercial websites Consulting: Schedule the project so that a golden nugget or two appear at the end of the engagement Airlines: Focus on the last encounter- Baggage Collection

11. Principle 2 : Get the Bad Experiences Out of the Way Early People prefer to have undesirable events come first- so they can avoid dread- and to have desirable events come at the end- so they can savor them Unfortunately, service providers dread delivering bad news, so they delay it until the last possible moment - Exactly the wrong thing to do

13. Disney’s Theme Parks ( Two 90 Sec rides better than One 3 min ride)Both halves of the principle:

14. Principle 4 : Build Commitment Through Choice People are happier and more comfortable when they believe they have some control over a process, particularly an uncomfortable one Patients, when involved in decisions, feel less helpless, less hopeless & more committed to making the process work Hotels – Alarm clock vs. Wake-up call Xerox Servicing - Choice over schedule

15. Principle 5 : Give People Rituals, and Stick to Them Rituals are used to mark key moments in the relationship, establish professional credentials, set expectations, and get feedback “McKinsey grunt—uh-huh, uh-huh” Not getting the weekly call from the consultant on a project, not copying the CEO on a progress report, not returning phone calls immediately – any of these lapses can be blamed after the fact for a failure

16. The Right Remedy Process-based remedies should be applied to process-based problems and outcome-based remedies should be applied to outcome-based problems