The Classification of services is no more than a theoretical importance. With reference to any services classification scheme, critically examine this statement.

Kotler defines services as any activities or benefits that one party can offer to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything. He goes on to say that its production may or may not be tied to a physical product. Palmer (1994) defines services as the production of essentially intangible benefit either in its own right or as a significant element of a tangible product which through some form of exchange satisfies an identified consumer need. According to Wikipedia (1996a)A service is the non-material equivalent of a good. A service is any act or performance that one party offers to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything.

Kotler(2000)Services are intangible, inseparable, variable, and perishable. These aspects affect the design of the marketing management framework. Each characteristic poses challenges and requires certain strategies. Marketers must find ways to give tangibility to intangibles, to increase the productivity of service providers, to increase and standardize the quality of the service provided, and to match the supply of services during peak and nonpeak periods with market demand.

Intangibility

Palmer (1994 ) states that “a pure service cannot be assessed using any of the physical senses. Services are intangible. This allude to the fact that services cannot be touched or viewed. Unlike physical products, they cannot be seen, tasted, felt, heard, or smelled before they are bought. This poses a challenge for clients to tell in advance what they will be getting. Services are ideas and concepts that are part of a process. The client typically relies on the service providers’ reputation and the trust they have with them to help predict quality-of-service and make service choices. Regulations and governance are means to assuring some acceptable level of quality-of-service. It is the duty of the service marketer to tangibilize the intangible through the physical evidence. The person who is getting a face lift cannot see the exact results before the purchase, just as the patient in the psychiatrist’s office cannot know the exact outcome before treatment.

To reduce uncertainty, buyers will look for signs or evidence of the service quality. They will draw inferences about quality from the place, people, equipment, communication material, symbols, and price that they see. Therefore, the service provider’s task is to “manage the evidence,” to “tangibilize the intangible.”Whereas product marketers are challenged to add abstract ideas, service marketers are challenged to add physical evidence and imagery to abstract offers. This is why Allstate uses the slogan “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”In general, service marketers must be able to transform intangible services into concrete benefits. For example, Marketers in service companies use sensory evidence and the development of strong brands in reducing uncertainty, hence reducution of  perceived risk is evident. service marketer is to stimulate personal influence sources such as word of mouth which is normally an non-paid form advertising. Celebrities and other famous people may be used in this regard for instance Phillip Chiyangwa.

Inseparability

Kotler(2000)Services are typically produced and consumed simultaneously, unlike physical goods,

which are manufactured, put into inventory, distributed through resellers, and consumed

later. If a person or a machine renders the service, then the provider is part of the service for instance service of bank ATMs can only be enjoyed if the producer and consumer interact. In the extreme case of personal care services-high involving, the customer must be present during the entire process (a doctor cannot provide a service without the involvement of the patient). This is not true for physical goods that are manufactured, put into inventory, distributed through multiple resellers and consumed still later (Kottler, 2000)

Because the client is also present as the service is produced, provider-client interaction

is a special feature of services marketing—both provider and client affect the

outcome. As tangible clues, service providers are evaluated based on their use of language, clothing, personal hygiene and interpersonal communication skills. Marketers should strive to create performance teams which Goffman defined as a set of individuals who cooperate to create a single definition of reality (Goffman, 1959,p, 79). The implications on marketing management is that staff has to be trained to interact effectively with clients, look for ways to prevent other customers from disturbing others.  Often, buyers of services have strong provider preferences. Several strategies exist for getting around this limitation. One is higher pricing in line with the provider’s limited time. Another is having the provider work with larger groups or work faster.

An alternative strategy is to train more service providers and build up client confidence. Service providers also have to put emphasis on selecting and training public contact personnel. Since public personnel are part of the service experience their emotions and attitudes are apparent to the customer and can affect the service experience for better or for worse. It is essential to build trust and teamwork and making employees loyal to the company’s mission. Employees must also be trained in ‘soft’ management skills such as reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance and managing the tangibles that surround the service in order to achieve service quality

Attempting to balance consumer needs with efficient operating procedures is a delicate art this is because it entails effectively managing different market segments with different needs within a single service environment. However, effective customer management can minimize this challenge. For example, separating smokers from non smokers in a restaurant will help create a conducive environment for different customer segments Below is an illustration of how hotel service companies have dealt with separating production and consumption. Here there is no direct interaction of production and consumption where customers interact with the facilitating medium (Hoffman, 2001).

Inventorability

Kotler(2000)Services cannot be stored and are produced on demand and in the presence of a consumer, that is, they are perishable. The in-inventorability nature of service calls upon the service organization to manage demand and capacity. Services can not be saved, their unused capacity cannot be reserved.  Inability to inventory creates profound difficulties for marketing services.

To match fluctuating demand, down time can be scheduled during periods of low demand to avoid breakdowns during peak periods, using part time employees in services such as the bank or supermarkets where demand sky rocket during festive seasons. Alternatively a firm may rent or share extra facilities and equipment to avoid over investment in assets. A theatre company can rent or hire part of its premises during the week when their demand is low to companies who might need to conduct seminars. Employees can be cross trained so that during peak times, some can assist frontline personnel as an example in banks or help back office personnel to balance off books during periods of low demand.

Inconsistency

Because services depend on who provides them and when and where they are provided,

they are highly variable. Knowing this, service firms can take three steps toward

quality control. The first is recruiting the right service employees and providing them

with excellent training. This is crucial regardless of whether employees are highly

skilled professionals or low-skilled workers

who visits MaterDei Hospital to have an operation or tooth extraction. However, simply classifying the above on a single service classification may leave out the fact that the person has to go to the service provider (another service classification scheme examined later in this essay). Also education services for instance, are an intangible service directed at persons’ mind (Intangible action). Other examples of services delivery classifications delivered to the person include services of Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) and services of Standard Chartered Bank. In a restaurant like Chicken Inn, the customer receives both the intangible action and tangible action

Under the question of type of relationship that the service provider provides, services can be classified as either consumer or producer services. This is summarized by Luvlock in the diagram overleaf.

                                                            Membership relationship                  No formal relationship

Continuous Relationship	Insurance, Telephone, Banking	Radio (ZBC), Police Station
Discrete Relationship	Subscriptions for Clubs, theaters

Services provided by telephone and electricity service providers are continuous services meaning the consumer can access them at any given time. According to Luvlock, the service can either be offered on a membership relationship or no formal relationship basis. The services offered by radio service providers are an example of services where there is no formal relationship between the producer and the customer. The point that Luvlock is highlighting in the matrix above is that classifying a service as continuous alone may leave out the aspect of whether it has a membership or no formal membership relationship.

Services may also be classified as either producer or consumer based. Zimbabwe’s telephone service provider Net One for instance, may offer a contract mobile telephone line to NUST as a producer service. However, the same line can also be used for personal telephone calls which are a consumer service. The matrix therefore attempts to solve the overlapping of service classification in a real world.

Services can also be classified according to degree of customization and judgment as illustrated below.

                                                               Extent of service customisation

Extent of customer contact               High                                                                Low

High	Legal services, tutorials, taxi services.	Teaching in a large class  (mass customisation)
Low	Hotel room service, retail banking, telephone services	Public transport, fast food restaurants and movie theatres

Unlike physical products, services are created as they are consumed and the customer usually is involved in the service production process (Core production of services). For other services like musical concert and entertainment, there is co consumption that is all customers enjoy the service at the same time. Due to the nature of such services as taxi and legal services, the need for high degree of customization and contact is of paramount importance. In contrast, although teaching a large class may require a high degree of customer contact, the degree of service customisation is lower. Someone who orders food at Holiday Inn on room service will get low customer contact just like the one in a movie theater. However, the two services differ in that the former requires lower customisation compared to the former.

According to the traditional classification schemes, services may also be classified as either marketable or unmarketable. However, services that used to be unmarketable like care of the elderly and child minding/care are now highly commercialized in the practical service industry today. There are now a lot of Child Care Agencies that are placing advertisements in the newspapers. Parastatals like Zimpost, Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and government Ministries like the Ministry of Heath and Child Welfare are now heavily competing or cooperating with the private sector in aggressive advertisement of their products and services.

According to methods of service delivery, some services wait for customers to come to them or with others, the customer has to personally go to the service provider. This aspect of High or Low Contact was briefly highlighted at the beginning of this essay, but however, another factor that can separate that is, either ingle site or multiple sites. This is illustrated overleaf.

                                      DELIVERY METHOD

                                                            Single site                                           multiple sites

Customer goes to the organisation	Barber shop, movie	Fast food Chains (Chicken Inn), bus service
Organization goes to the customer.	Taxi , lawn mowing and pest control	Mail delivery
Both transact at arms length	Credit card	Telephone

The example of a barber here for the second time shows the practical overlapping of theoretical  service classifications. As shown above, some services require the customer to go to the service provider either on a single site or multiple sites.  In the developed world for instance, one can catch an inter-city bus shuttle on multiple sites at multiple sites. On contrary, taxi, lawn mowing and pest control services require the service provider to go to the customer to provide the service. For example, the over grown grass on NUST grounds will necessitate the service providers like the local authority tractors to visit the client to perform the service.

Services unlike physical products can not be stocked which a character of uninventoribility. According to the classification which answers the question of the nature of demand and supply, service providers like hotels and restaurants can not recover the lost revenue once there is no one who comes to have lunch or if thee rooms are empty on a given day the revenue is lost forever. Pattern of demand vary from hourly, monthly, seasonally or yearly according to the industry.

                                                                        Extent of fluctuations over time

                                                            Wide                                                   Narrow

Peak demand can be met without delay	Electricity, telephone, maternity clinic	Insurance, legal services and banking
Peak demand exceeds capacity	Hotels, restaurants, theatres

As illustrated above services providers like ZESA and Net One for instance, may be able to quickly adjust their supply to meet demand in the short run unlike hotels and restaurants that are not able to expand supply (rooms capacity) in the short run should peak demand exceeds supply.

Service classifications in a practical world tend to overlap and the theoretical applications do not always apply on single classifications. To solve this challenge, Luvlock classified the services using cluster analysis and this is also supported by Solomon and Gould (1991) who says that theoretical classifications normally combines two or more of the traditional classifications.

BIBILOGRAPHY

Marketing Management 7^th Edition:                       Phillip Kotler

Principles of Services Marketing 1^st Edition:          Palmer A

Services Marketing 2^nd Edition:                               Luvlock

www.answers.com