Service Operation
... prongs, although distinct from each other, are entwined. Surfacing issues is about emerging the aspects relevant to the customers themselves regarding customer satisfaction; monitoring impact is about determining whether interventions to improve customer satisfaction have succeeded. An interplay exists between the two prongs. Surfacing issues will pinpoint certain aspects of customer satisfaction that need to be addressed. Intervening to improve these aspects, will lead to the need to monitor the impact of the intervention(s). On the other hand, monitoring impact might again reveal further issues not surfaced before. Figure 1. The dynamic spiral Some questions remain to be answered. Customer satisfaction is a complex issue, experienced subjectively and constituting quantitative and qualitative aspects of which several are intangibles. It should be attempted to work within the customers’ conceptual framework, to gain insight into their subjective understanding of their experiences regarding customer satisfaction. GABEK – an applicable tool The term GABEK is a German acronym for “the holistic processing of linguistically expressed complexity”. GABEK has the ability to structure unordered textual data to reveal a network of meaning in the form of a gestaltentree. From the unsorted individual responses meaningful and coherent text groups are selected and, if meeting certain syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions, a text group is termed a linguistic gestalt. Each linguistic gestalt is then summarised by one statement using the respondents’ words. The process of selecting meaningful and coherent text groups is repeated on the level of gestalten to yield hypergestalten, and so forth. A gestaltentree is thus obtained with complexity diminishing but relevancy increasing towards the top of the tree. The gestaltentree, expressed in the respondents’ own words, provides a holistic picture of the contents of the respondents’ views and perceptions. GABEK offers a tool for the qualitative analysis of open-ended questionnaires beyond traditional methodology. It does not employ identifying concepts and determining their frequency of occurrence, neither is it anecdotal – rather, it provides a holistic overview of the field(s) of opinions and feelings researched by structuring the individual responses on the open-ended questions in a transparent and tractable manner. Within the dynamic spiral of continuously monitoring customer satisfaction, GABEK is of particular use in surfacing issues and monitoring impact because: • It presents a remarkably effective means of surfacing the underlying structure of the respondents’ perceptions in the form of the gestaltentree. Issues surfaced towards the top of the tree are relevant aspects of the respondents’ perceptions of customer satisfaction and of the respondents’ perceptions of the impact of interventions aimed at increasing customer satisfaction. • GABEK is employed in a manner encouraging individual responses, negating the possible influence of one dominant respondent, as is often not the case when using other methods to gain qualitative data, such as focus groups. • Because of the employing of open-ended questions, in surfacing issues as well as in monitoring impact, respondents will tend to make suggestions regarding the improvement of customer satisfaction and will tend to express causes of a perceived level of customer satisfaction. In the causal nets GABEK exposes this richness of information in a structured manner, availing the investigator the opportunity to capitalise on these when deciding on appropriate interventions for the possible improvement of customer satisfaction. An application: Personal banking in South Africa Banks are service industries and should be extremely customer focused. But, does the “man in the street” customer feel that his bank is delivering a quality service to him? What would he want his bank to be like? The authors conducted a study amongst everyday South African citizens aimed at determining what their feelings and their expectations are regarding their banks. About 120 respondents (sufficient for a GABEK analysis based on two open-ended questions (De Wet & Pothas, 1999)) answered to the following two open-ended questions: • What comes to your mind when you think about your bank? • What do you envisage the ideal bank to be like? In each case the respondents were asked to motivate their views in a few sentences. The resulting paragraphs were analysed with GABEK. The GABEK results show the issues of concern from the viewpoint of the respondents, i.e. the dynamic spiral’s surfacing issues, and also indicate possible interventions as suggested by the respondents of which the impact will have to be monitored, i.e. the dynamic spiral’s monitoring impact. In this section the GABEK results are discussed, highlighting the issues surfaced. For illustrative purposes the authors, without actually performing any intervention, suggest a scheme for monitoring the impact of one possible intervention based on the issues surfaced. Regarding queues, the respondents also expressed their views on staff attitude, the competence of the staff, hiring of more staff especially at peak times, the use of technology to shorten queues, the effect of queues on security, etc. For our purposes here it is not meant to fully explicate the issue of queues or any of the other nine issues surfaced, but merely to point at some aspects surfaced with a view on possible intervention and the second prong of the dynamic spiral, namely monitoring impact. With the same objective of illustrating the dynamic spiral in mind, many more examples abound; of which one more will be illustrated here. From Figure 2 (see attached page) the issue of security is perceived as especially worrying at the automatic teller machines (ATMs). By analysing the respondents’ views on the security at the ATMs specifically, numerous suggestions for improving the security at the ATMs have been made. These, as surfaced from the original responses to the two open-ended questions asked, are shown in the causal net depicted in Figure 3. Figure 3. Personal banking: security at the ATMs From the viewpoint of the respondents, improved security at the ATMs might lead to a feeling of safety and to not changing their banks. The respondents clearly stated that a lack of security at the ATMs and the corresponding feeling of not being safe, might cause them to change their banks. The existing practice of using cards at the ATMs for withdrawing money, was perceived as inviting crime, i.e. cards were regarded as easily stolen and misused. Suggestions for the improving of security at the ATMs included linking the cards to identification by fingerprints, not only by “secret” pin numbers. Security guards should be...