Scripts in Service Delivery - Essay Example

This unspoken knowledge is about the customer experience more than what he did. For example, when a customer gets served in a restaurant, his serving and his experience at the restaurant both counts. Therefore, to model customer scripts efficiently, the service providers usually have to design simulations to proceed. One helpful tool in this regard is the mental models that define how and to what extent a course of events is related to a specific service facility. The next step is to make a distinction between the real and probable consumers by looking at the differences between the scripts and to make related service solutions. Effectively consistent services are then designed for every type of customer that he is also able to understand easily through scripts. This way, we can say that scripts are very advantageous when they are used to design tremendously standardized services (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons). Once the service providers take hold of the customer script, they get facilitated in designing the service process enabling the customers to effortlessly steer through that service process along with giving them the idea of how they can be a part of the service production. However, the designers need to create such a service design that easily incorporates the differences in customer scripts. Hence, a script enables a customer to get at ease because can understand what the service is going to provide.

            Scripts facilitate the provider to know the customer’s needs and enable him to guide the customer about the service with minimum disturbance (Hope and Mühlemann). For example, the statement: “Do you allow me to suggest our special mid-night deal?” allows a customer to make a quick decision. Scripts also serve as analogies because a worker who has had experience in playing with scripts can use those scripts as a help in making new ones. Scripts are also helpful when the employees have to share unwanted or unwelcome information with the customers. Statements like, “I apologize for the inconvenience but this is our policy”, are a great help.

            Another advantage of a script is that they enable the service providers to make use of them in new situations by only modifying them- situations to which customers are not familiar. They may not have developed a script for this new situation and may have to use an existing one. For example, Frauendorf (233) quotes Noteboom who states that when motorways came into existence, the concept of self-catering restaurants in the service area was new to the customers and more so because they had not an already developed script. Therefore the “process structure of supermarkets” (233) was implemented in the motorway restaurant services because the customers were already familiar with the scripts they used in supermarkets.