Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm

I was very happy with the quality of the book along with the price. I ordered the book a week prior to my class starting and received it with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, I had to return the item due to a miscommunication with the campus bookstore and instructor. The seller accepted the return and credited my account with no problems.

This is a wonderful text to know the fundamentals of Services Marketing. Everywhere we see mess ups in service delivery. Awareness of the basic concepts presented herein will help avoid many a pitfall and also help pave the way for a win-win situation in services marketing. This book presents the GAPS model very lucidly and provides many case studies to clarify the concepts. A great investment to learn about this important component of the economy.

For online marketing, this book is one of the better ones on the bookshelf. The case studies are excellent and engaging, although the rest of the book was lengthy and difficult to read and retain over the course of a semester. This book, like most textbooks, could sacrifice some of its content for the sake of brevity.

The book is very clear in the format and structure. It talks about the solutions of the problems arising in service marketing step by step. It first describes what service is and the increasing importance of service. Then, it puts much emphasis on people, the very important marketing mix in service. It focuses on customers: how customers perceive and expect service. Next, it focuses on providers: how companies know what customers expect; how they select the right service designs and standards; how they deliver service to standards and how they match performance to promising.It is also good to have a very detailed example (case) in the beginning of each chapter and the content will very often refer to that example, which make me easier to understand. But sometimes, I think it would be better if more different examples are used in the same chapter.Besides, the GLOBAL FEATURE, the TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT and the EXHIBIT make the book even more fruitful and let me know more about the related areas under that topic. Great!

Essentially everything that marketers do over the Internet, from the ASP to the online retailer, is a service. Services marketers face unique challenges. Today's electronic marketer will find useful lessons in the services marketing literature. You will find either Valarie Zeithaml or Mary Jo Bitner in the byline of almost every important piece of research on services marketing published in the 1990s. Together, they have produced a textbook that is very much worthy of their reputations. This book is fairly comprehensive, although it does not include Bitner's most recent work on consumer response to self-service technologies. Still, as an electronic marketer reads through this book, they cannot help but find themselves asking new questions about their business and how they can make it better. The book is a relatively easy read, and it is not overly academic--the theories and frameworks presented are simply tools that lead to practical solutions to real problems. There are many examples in the text; often, the company is familiar but the business practices described here are not so well known. I strongly recommend this book to e-marketers.