With the emergence of education, healthcare, and software consultancy services, the service sector has achieved a significant position in the country’s economy. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to have a department for the marketing of services.
It is not easy for organizations to market services. Service marketers must be expert at attracting potential service customers towards the service organization by utilizing all the 7 P’s of the service marketing mix. The following points highlight the importance of service marketing:
1) Helps in Building Relationships: Service marketing results in building long-term relationships with the target customers. As there is no tangible product with service marketers to offer, they rely on understanding the customers’ needs and demands and fulfilling them through concerned service offerings in the most effective way.
In this way, trust and loyalty are developed within the customers for the service organization, resulting in long-term relationships with them. These relationships help in generating repeat purchases as well as word of mouth promotion.
2) Assists in Affecting Customers’ Perception: Several interaction points are designed for the target customers while offering the services. The customer’s overall buying process is influenced by the cumulative effect of these interaction points, i.e., people involved in delivering the services, the process and methodologies used by such people, and the surrounding physical evidence. These interaction points help in affecting the perception of the target customers.
3) Involves Customers’ Feedback: The marketing approach of services is quite different from that of tangible products, as consumers play a significant role in the marketing process. Here, the customer’s feedbacks are invited and studied to improve the efficiency of service marketing.
In this way, a healthy relationship is developed with the customers, and they become loyal to the service organization.
4) Helps in Differentiating the Service Organization: Service organizations offering similar services/products to the market are efficiently differentiated with the service marketing approach. Service marketing helps highlight the quality features of the services offered by the organization to make the service organization preferred over the competitors.
For example, it is service marketing because people differentiate between the Domino’s and Pizza Hut as both deliver the same product.
5) Offers Higher Customer Retention: In today’s world of cut-throat competition, the marketers are to fish out the limited customers. In such a scenario, it becomes more important to retain customers instead of attracting new ones.
In service marketing, the customers’ needs and feedbacks are analyzed to deliver the desired services. Therefore, customers are satisfied by offering customized services, and it results in higher customer retention.