service marketing plan

On 15 November 2017, SMRT had suffered another service failure as a result of a software glitch in the East-West Line signalling system caused two trains to collide at Joo Koon MRT station. The collision took place at 8.20am during the regular service periods and disrupted train services between Boon Lay and Tuas Link stations through the day. This had resulted in injuries to 29 people as the train came to a sudden halt after its impact with the first one, causing the target market to lose their balance and fall. Although SMRT service employees were vigilant to provide prompt assistance to the target market and dealt with the damage, the target market were still disappointed and outraged over the train services.

Time affects the behaviour of the target market and their attitudes towards a service or a product (Maguire, Kawas and Geiger 2015, 212). The service failure caused by the SMRT had brought negative disconfirmation to the target market. The target market has an expectation that the train service provided will arrive on time because of the increase of fares they had paid for. The target market felt a lack of enjoyment in the service they had encountered and a loss of time resulting in negative consequences from their workplace.

The negative actual service experience encountered by the target market had resulted in an increased of their temporal risks with SMRT. The longer it takes for the service to be recovered, the higher the dissatisfaction level towards SMRT. This meant that the target market will need to have more patience while their time has been delayed, thus causing them to have negative impression towards SMRT. The service failure had reflected that SMRT had failed to address the importance of time from the target market’s perspective. This had resulted in inconveniences to the target market, causing them to waste more time resulting in negative mood states. Consequently, the target market would not perceive SMRT favourably and may resort to other mean of transportation in the future (Makarem, Mudambi and Podoshen 2009, 136).

Moreover, SMRT had failed in providing proper communications to the target market during the service failure. This caused a chaotic scene at the platform resulting in a loss of goodwill from the target market. This had also resulted in unpleasant sight (sensory risks) and negative impact to SMRT’s ability in handling train disruption and managing the target market.

The service provided by SMRT is intended to serve its purpose as a main transport system for target market. With this service failure, the level of perceived risks had increased and these risks arise when there is a conflict between the target market’s expectations and that of the SMRT promised service (Brack and Benkenstein, 2014, 138). The service failure had negative affect SMRT’s service quality, which is also perceived wholly on the target market’s experience (commuting) on it (Randheer, AL-Motawa and Vijay.J, 2011, 10). The service failure had rejected that SMRT had failed to note the important of the service quality which also includes external factors such as alternative services, frequency of travelling and timings, convenience and comfort (Randheer, AL-Motawa and Vijay.J, 2011, 12) Consequently, this would have caused the target market to doubt its service promises as well as spreading of negative word-of-mouth on its services. Eventually, this would negative affect SMRT’s ability in meeting the financial objectives. These perceived risks had also resulted in the target market losing their confidence and reducing their satisfaction level, thus, opposing or feeling injustice to its pricing strategy (Leroi-Werelds, Streukens, Brady and Swinnen, 2013, 441).

Customer satisfaction is the attitude resulting from the comparison of the expectation of performance and the perceived performance of the service experience. This is known as expectancy disconfirmation, and it applies to SMRT (Hume, Margee and Mort 2010, 175).

Whenever there are service failures, it does not necessarily lead to target market dissatisfaction, since the target market accept that things can sometimes go wrong, particularly in transportation services. In contrast, the lack of response from SMRT to the failure is the most likely cause of dissatisfaction (Rio-Lanza, Belén and Vázquez-Casielles 2009, 778).

It will create a surge in a negative evaluation which will affect their reputation in the transportation industry. Hence, SMRT's inability to understand the importance of surpassing target market expectations will have a direct impact on their long-term profitability.

Both positive emotions and satisfaction were positively linked to loyalty. The higher the target market’s satisfaction with the hedonic service, the higher the level of on-the-spot behaviours aimed at tangibilising the experience (Bigné, Mattila and Andreu 2008, 304). When target market is satisfied with the services, it does contribute to positive word of mouth and therefore increasing the product usage of other potential customers.

This recommendation is considered to be process line extensions using the people theory. People are an important theory for SMRT because there must be a good communication between the service employees and the target market in order for an effective service recovery. It is crucial that SMRT invest more training for their employees to produce outstanding results.

SMRT employees must be trained in dealing with the chaotic scene during the service failure. They must be trained in listening to the target market’s complaints and making routine service decisions. SMRT employees working as a frontline service job can be stressful as they are expected to handle the target market in a faster and shorter time frame. Their tasks require them to response quickly to unique situations.

Human resource (HR) perceive as an important role for the success of the service branding. Training and development helps to enhance the value of SMRT and the internal culture (De Chernatony and née Drury 2009, 299). A service failure helps SMRT to tracks the errors in their delivery systems which involves many moments of truth. This will helps SMRT to identify its training needs and evaluate on the effectiveness of training efforts over time depending on the frequency of service failure. The recovery menu enables SMRT to recognise the recovery strategies with different types of failure situations, thus SMRT should not only train their employees but also prepare them to effectively recover from the target market’s reactions (Hoffman, Kelley and Rotalsky 2016, 8).

HR capabilities such as training, education and hiring process are assume as market-driven firms that must possess these ‘people’ capabilities, so that value can be added to the target markets and SMRT performance through competitive advantage. Strengthening the employee’s knowledge, skills and their interactions help to increase the service satisfaction and market effectiveness so that SMRT can meet the target market demand more efficiently (Orr, Bush and Vorhies 2011, 1075). With more advanced training, SMRT employees can upgrade themselves with the skills they had learnt and build up their self-confidence in handling big crowds and emergency during the peak hours. The standard operating procedure should continue to work closely to maintain the service quality.

Each of the SMRT employee should be appointed with different responsibilities and be cooperative to perform the stipulated task. It is also recommended that employees are given the empowerment as they are likely to perceive with greater authority for helping others because of their expanded efforts to handle with broader tasks. In addition, empowerment helps to enhance employee’s motivation. This also leads to effective performance at work such as using lesser response time to handle service failure, more flexibility and increasing the relationship with the target market (Cham and Lam 2011, 609). By empowering the SMRT employees, they can coordinate the target market’s participation with greater effort to deal with the unexpected service demands.

Thus, people theory related to training is highly recommended for SMRT to prevent more failures and can result in a positive disconfirmation.

One other recommended approach for SMRT should be the shift in focus on the process value of its services as opposed to the outcome value. Outcome value in this case is the focus on the alternatives SMRT has provided the target market with in order to counter the service failure. These alternatives include free shuttle bus services and price reductions on consecutive rides. A shift in focus can help the target market to create their own values of SMRT based on their own experiences (Luu et al. 2016, 635) instead of receiving one-off damage controls.

As a service provider that predominantly relies on its customer-centric relationships and gaining customer loyalty, SMRT should recognise the importance of yielding value creation through its processes. These processes can include an improvement through various ways to solely focus on efficiency in transporting target market from one place to another as its promised time and also increasing the usage of various mediums to alert target market on further delays. With an increase in pricing of train rides over the years, the target market has built an expectation of better services. This derives from the belief that there is a relationship between higher train fares that leads to better quality of maintenance. For SMRT to achieve customer satisfaction amongst the target market, this has to be implemented strongly.

This recommendation of major process innovations is considered to be a service redesign using process value. Through process innovations, there can exist customer loyalty and an improvement to their perceived value towards SMRT and its services. Building long-term relationships are much more important than one-off solutions (Palmer and Bejou 2016, 481).

Instead of pre-empting its target market of adding more minutes to their traveling time via the East-West Line, SMRT should have taken bigger precaution in alerting the target market. This would mean, allowing target market to be aware of the collision and pushing commuters to take other transportations to get to their designated destinations. This would have saved time for the target market during the morning rush hour.

To understand better the processes and experiences the target market goes through, there needs to be a change in the logic adoption from a service-dominant logic to a customer-dominant logic (Heinonen and Strandvik 2015, 476). Where the target market is primary, SMRT should create perspectives through the lens of the target market in order to further fathom the daily processes of commuting. By doing so, SMRT will be able to denote areas for service redesign. Understanding the perspective of how customers “embed” services in their processes will allow SMRT to focus on creating a safe and conducive service for the target market. The focus on the daily lives of the target market helps businesses to reallocate the focus or offerings in areas that require more attention (Heinonen and Strandvik 2016, 482).