Superior Customer Service and Marketing Excellence: Two Sides of the Same Success Coin

Abstract

Companies that rely solely on conventional marketing strategies — characterized by a heavy emphasis on aggressive advertising and other promotional activities — will find it more and more difficult to defend, let alone expand, their market turf. Because of the increasing intensity of competition in a number of sectors, a revised corporate-marketing mindset with superior customer service as its core is nec essary for attaining and sustaining market success over the long term. In this perspective piece, Parasuraman discusses the meaning and measurement of service quality, and offers managerial guidelines for delivering superior service by invoking key insights from a multiyear, multi-sector stream of research on cus tomer service. He advances arguments for broadening the scope of marketing to include the delivery of customer service as an integral component and demonstrates that a judicious blending of conventional marketing and su perior customer service is the best recipe for sustained market success.