In Human Resource Management - Assignment Example

Service Blueprint Table of Contents Service Blueprint 1 Table of Contents 1 1. 2 2. 3 3. 4 4. 5 5. 5 In Marketing: 5 In Human Resource Management: 6 In Operations: 6 6. 6 References 7 1. Aramark, which is headquartered in Philadelphia, USA, has worldwide offices, including one in Australia. The company is known for its professional services which mainly constitute operating as an outsourcer for a number of other service sectors including facility management, hospitality, food, uniform services, working with universities, parks and resorts, healthcare organisations, convention centers and more. The company has operations in as many as 19 countries and employs a little over 240,000 people worldwide. One of its major divisions is Aramark Parks and Resorts, which caters to around 20 major park destinations. Outside of Australia Aramark is a name to reckon with when a mention is made to Denali National Park, Lake Powell Resorts, Shenandoah National Park, National Recreation Area and Marinas. Each park operates around three to four service business that it handles through outsourcing contract. The question why this organisation is chosen to blueprint lies, in part, in its history. A couple of years back the organisation was confronted with a strange challenge. That was the declining repeat business in its overall service portfolio. The brunt of this decline was felt more in operations that included operations of campgrounds, boat rentals, food service operations and boat tours. On in-depth assessment of the problem, it was found that people were reluctant to return the second time since the first experience that they had did not meet their expectations. When these people did a comparative analysis between Aramark and other destinations, they only felt disappointed to have gone with the former. The problem was more pronounced with Marinas and Lake Powell Resorts. Clearly there was a need for employing both visual and traditional blueprint approaches to convince the client that is need for improvement in services so that repeat business could be generated. 2. Service blueprinting is an innovative technique and a number of characteristics are at play when the need for using innovative techniques arises. Process nature is one of the most basic characteristic of a service blueprint. It is because services are unlike physical goods as it takes a period of time to unfold them. Their very basic nature is dynamic. There are a number of sequential events and steps involved, and each step leads to a further transition towards good if the step is good and towards bad if the step is flawed. It is a constellation of activities that are at work (Gronroos, 2000). Customer experiences forms another important characteristic of service blueprinting in what is known as today's "experience economy" – term used to denote orchestration of the 'transformational', the 'memorable' (Johne and Storey, 1998). It is this orchestration that differentiates one service from the other. It is not important as to what service is being offered, everybody anyway offers the same service; what is important is how the service is offered, what the presentation is and how much the lasting impression that it is capable of making. Meyer and Schwager (2007) have remarked that customer experience is “the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company". Another important aspect is service development and design. In order to encourage repeat and expanding business effective service organisations make sure that they do not keep their service development initiatives as ad hoc. They move very methodologically and more systematically through numerous stages, where objective for each stage is clearly indicated and founded on service design, customer feedback, concept development, idea generation, service launch and prototyping. Both customer process and customer outcome is required to be analysed so as to develop effective service design (Jong and Vermeulen, 2003). All along these factors, what holds key to the success of service blueprinting is a few components that go a long way in steering it to the desired direction. These include customer actions, visible onstage contact employee actions, invisible backstage contact employee actions, physical evidence and short processes. All of these have a profound impact on service blueprinting. There is a chronological order to all these, but customer actions forms the top of the blueprinting pyramid. The customer actions are central to the service blueprinting and determine customer satisfaction. This is, in f act, what makes service blueprinting different from other flowchart approaches (Echeverri, 2005). 3. Those processes that are likely to go wrong during the development or execution of service blueprinting are termed as fail points. Something can be said to have gone wrong if things envisioned do not turn up the way one had intended the same to be. This effects service quality adversely and things stand chances of getting worse from bad (Shostack, 1984). This is one reason why service managers normally evaluate all points rather than few potential ones that might lead to fail points in the long run. Statistical monitoring methods can be used to determine fail points. Testing methods and hypothesis are also used to do the task. Since fail points can be both invisible and visible to the customer, they become potential scenarios to handle when they are visible. This normally happens when they are either above or below the visibility line. Service managers need to show a proactive approach in dealing with fail points if they have arisen and a practical approach in not letting them erupt in the first place. t is a tightrope walk as if something as important as a service blueprint that is meant to make a service better starts giving problems instead. Normally in a service blueprint, the process moves between three lines, which are line of interaction, line of visibility and line of internal interaction. Line of visibility, which is between the other two lines, is a fragile line and if not handled well it can expose the very internal line of interaction to the customers, thus spreading customer disillusionment quickly. One fail point could be that the internal interaction was not standardised and lacked a clear agenda, another fail point could be that the problems the service is facing are not correctly identified and one more fail point could be that the blueprint itself was flawed. 4. If something of this nature happens with a blueprint, it may have to be reworked all over again. But before that it is important to identify the fail points. As mentioned above, a blueprint is characteristic of three lines, which are horizontally placed across the blueprint chart. Above the line of visibility all actions from the service provider are visible to the customer; this is the most vulnerable area of a blueprint as it can have a direct and unasked interaction with the customer. Fail points are generally seen above this line and first step towards their rectification is to encircle them with a F. Then that will be followed with redesign of the blueprint. It is very important to note that in order to identify and address the fail points , even fail points may need their own blueprinting so as to be able to address them effectively. It is an in-depth interplay of these horizontal line with vertical lines in a blue print, which identify the truth of the blueprint chart, that helps mitigate the fail points. It is not always necessary that service failure is by virtue of a human error; gaps in systemic control and design of the same could also be widely responsible. These gaps need to be addressed (Murphy, 2011). 5. Service blueprinting can be used in a number of fields like service marketing, human resource management, operations management and system technology. In Marketing: It can be used by creating realistic customer expectations through service system design and promotion. In order to accomplish this, customer-defined service standards holds key to development of an effective service blueprinting concept. It helps distinguish between how company defines its services and how customer view it in reality. It is a question of setting the standards right. If services are viewed and imposed the way company looks at them rather than customers, problems are bound to happen. Further to it, there are "soft" and "hard" customer-defined standards that need to be looked into correctly rather than making any service as one-time service fix; something that can be said did happen with Aramark leading to absence of repeat customers. Service blueprinting helps translate customer expectations into repeatable, definable and actionable behaviours and actions. In Human Resource Management: This is a very important part of any organisation and service blueprinting can be used in this area by empowering the human element through proper selection criteria, job descriptions and appraisal systems. Service blueprint ensures that there is clarity of the organisational and other visions prevalent in the organisation, including one on customer satisfaction, to the human resource personnel so that they can help cultivate the values in the teams through their human resource initiatives. The basic fundamental of human resource is to manage human potential so effectively that they value-add on the organisational vision through positive customer interactions (Dessler, 2005). In Operations: Bitner et al., (2007) have stated that key operations are helped by proper utilisation of service blueprinting in an organisation. Gersch et al., (2011) have supported that statement by adding that all the steps in a blueprinting process can guarantee ultimate customer satisfaction by way of visualising, analysing, organising, controlling and developing fruitful external and internal processes for an organisation. 6. This assignment is a clear indication that if a service is going downwards, there are reasons for the trend. There are certain areas that have failed and those areas need to be identified and addressed. A service blueprint is a powerful tool to do this identification and also develop ideas and concepts that can address the failure points by bringing about relevant changes. For example, following service blueprinting, the complaints received at Aramark reduced by fifty percent. The blueprints, clearly, were creating a focus for change. References Bitner, M. J. Ostrom, A. L. and Morgan, F. N. (2007). Service Blueprint: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. Center for Service Leadership, Arizona State University. Dessler, G. (2005). Human Resource Management. Pearson: Prentice Hall. de Jong, P.J. and Vermeulen, P.A.M. (2003). “Organizing Successful New Service Development,”Management Decision, Vol. 41, No. 9, 844-858. Echeverri, E. (2005). “Video-Based Methodology: Capturing Real-Time Perceptions of Customer Processes,” International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 16, No. 2, 199-209. Gersch, M. Hewing, M. and Schöler B. (2011). Business Process Blueprinting – an enhanced view on process performance. Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 17, No. 5, 732-747. Gronroos, C. (2000). Service Marketing and Management: A Customer Relationship Management Approach, Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Johne, A and Storey, C. (1998). “New Service Development: A Review of the Literature and Annotated Bibliography,” European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 32, No. 3-4, 184-251. Meyer, C. and Schwager, A. (2007). "Understanding Customer Experience,Harvard Business Review, Vol. 85, No. 2. 117-126. Murphy, S.A. (2011). A successful ServiceScape encourages consumer-staff interaction and makes everyone's tasks easier. Available http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/article/info-pro-adopting-tools-world-business-consulting. Accessed September 26, 2014. Shostack, G.L. (1984). “Designing Services That Deliver,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, 133-139. Read More