Managing Service with class

Differentiating physical products is one of the toughest task for product companies in today's competitive world. since it has been difficult to differentiate the physical products, companies are now turning to service differentiation. companies have found significant profitability in delivering the superior service whether that means quick delivery, faster resolution of complaints or quick answering of customer queries. Service provider knows these advantages as well.so what should you do differently from your competition in providing the great service to your customers. well the first and foremost important thing is

• Feel the product as customer. Think like customer, Imagine that you walk into store and how you would want to be treated. Create the experience in your mind and replicate the same in your organisation.
• Encourage empathy in the employees. Be empathetic. train them to be good listener and quick solver of the problem.
• Create the best team. Work on employer self esteem. If your employees are happy your customers too will be happy
• All your decision should be data centric. Data centricity is the future of the business. 

Services are  like "The Invisible Man" ( Mr. India) which cant be seen,tasted,felt,heard or smelled. lets take an example. At VLCC you have been told that under one program you will lose x kgs but you cant see the results before the purchase or before you join the program. To be able to trust in these programs companies will publish the feedback, recommendation from people using communication material, symbols and price. People too will check with friends, family, internet etc. One of the prime KRA's of service marketer is to be able to transform intangible services into concrete benefits and well defined experience. The Disney company is a master at tanibilizing the intangible and creating magical fantasies in theme parks. Similarly the luxury tourist train "Palace On wheels" a joint venture of Rajasthan tourism and Indian railways is highly successful due to careful design, excellent service which has resulted into delivering superior customer experience. 

Lets take the example of application business. 

In a research conducted by Kentar it was observed that Android has out paced I phones by hefty margin of 52.1% to 42.3% 

A market study done by Comscore gives the similar picture as Kentar. Android has 52.3% market share where as IOS has 37.8 % market share.

IDC world wide says that android captures 70% of market share where as IOS stands at 21%.

So its clearly evident that Android is the market leader in terms of market share and most of the people will conclude that Android is more profitable where as there is twist in the story. In spite of capturing 70% of market share Android is lacking behind in terms of profitability. Apple has 72% of the profit, Samsung has made 29% of the industry profit. 

Lets try to find out the reason behind profitability, so we will evaluate both the smart phone OS on certain parameters like No. of apps in application store and quality of app in each store,download per OS, business download per OS, spending per OS... etc First lets compare the no. of apps in each store

Both have equal no. of apps. In terms of quality IOS has better quality then Android as per the survey done by U test.

Lets take the 3rd parameter which is  no. of downloads Android at 51% market share where as IOS has 40% market share.

Lets take the 4th parameter which is download revenue. Android is at 20% share where as IOS is at 74% share.

Looking at 5th parameter which is net market share in terms of OS usage for the month of March 2013, we can conclude that android has 24% market share and IOS is at 61.4% market share as per the survey done by Net market share. 

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However survey done by Stats counter gives very different figure. It says in the month of March 2013 Android was at 37% and IOS at 27%. Going with the above figures it seems Stat counter figure is more valid than Net market share.  

Lets consider the last parameter which is the enterprise use of  mobile platforms. Here also IOS is winner with 62% market share and Android at 35% market share,

Some more data on IOS. A survey was done on 1200 subscribers across France, US, UK and Japan and findings of the survey is as follows :- 

So if you compare all the parameters you can conclude that Apple in spite of low market share has high profitability because of high brand equity. Brand "Apple" has placed themselves as niche brand and has been able to target niche customers whose spending is higher than the average Android customer. All this is possible by excellent & innovative combo of  of pricing, packaging and distribution. And the experience you have as an Apple customer cant be compared with any OS. Excellent service, Intelligent marketing is core of Apple, however Android is not far off. If you take average life of customer after attaining teenage is 50 years and going by consumer behavior we all know that customer gets bored using the same brand even if the brand is fulfilling all the cues, hence IOS customers are going to use Android in their life span and vice versa, so to conclude every consumer in their life span is going to use Android as well as IOS.  Android should aspire to become IOS and IOS should compete with themselves and should keep on enhancing the feature and bring the best of technology, Innovation for the customers. Lets do the unusual comparison of brands like Äpple "with our Bollywood. Bollywood Ä class"actors like Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Deepika padukone, Katrina kaif. these A class actors need to be very particular about their image. Celebrity marketing is major business and these stars should create themselves as brand and some of them have been able to convert themselves as brand. e.g Salman's movie "Dabang"or Tere Naam"people have gone crazy and have copied his hairstyle to dressing. In this case fans have become brand ( Salman Khan) advocates. 

 Hence we can conclude that Managing service with class should be strategy for Ä"class brands and it should be aspired by all whether product or people.

*data credit - techostat