Product Description

Services Marketing, 5/e, recognizes that services present special challenges that must be identified and addressed in real circumstances. The heart of the book’s content is to develop strong customer relationships through quality service. The book also focuses on knowledge needed to implement service strategies for competitive advantage across industries. Hence, frameworks for customer-focused management, and strategies for increasing customer satisfaction and retention through service are included in the fifth edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #560452 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 736 pages

About the Author
Valarie Zeithaml is the Roy and Alice H. Richards Bicentennial Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean for the MBA Program at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina.

Mary Bitner (Mesa, AZ) teaches at Arizona State University-Tempe.

Customer Reviews

An important book for electronic marketers
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.

Great Book
As a former student of Dr. Bitner, her course and this book made up the foundation that the Services Marketing and Management MBA program at Arizona State Uni. built from. It's an extensive review of how customers are the most important part to a service oriented business, and to neglect them at any touch point is a service failure.
This book will outline the process by which any company, be it real or virtual, can develop world class service.
This book and the SMM program at Arizona State University are highly recommended.

Great!
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!