2. The service promise
• We can define service along three axes:
• Experience
• Relationship
• Co-creation
• Customers judge service quality based on an
ongoing relationship, not just a single
transaction.
3. The service promise
• As Rebecca Sinclair, a designer from Airbnb, said during
a talk “We realized that the product was the trip.” What
she meant by that comment is that people don’t reserve
a hotel room because they want a hotel room. They do it
because they need a place to stay while they’re traveling.
4. Making the right promise
• What is the traveler’s job-to-be-done upon arrival at the hotel
check-in desk?
5. Making the right promise
• “I can’t check you in because the system is down,” what is the nature of the
service failure? The failure consists of the fact that the hotel has made the
wrong promise.
• What guests really need is a promise to help them make the transition from
travel and stress to rest and relaxation, desk agents might be trained to do
something.
6. The chain of promises
• A service is a complex chain of promises.
7. Using promises to achieve digital
service quality
• Promise theory provides a set of questions:
• Which promises should we make?
• What promises do we need from others in order to keep our own promises?
• How do we maximize our trustworthiness by keeping the promises we make
and repairing the ones we break?
• What promises do our customers need to make?
8. Keeping promises
• Knowing which promises to make and which promises to seek from others is
necessary but not sufficient. What matters is keeping promises, not making
them. Whether others keep their promises to you is of little interest to the
recipeents of your promises.
• Component failures are inevitable. No real-world service can guarantee that
none of those failures will become visible to its customers
9. Helping others keep their promises
• “What promises do our customers need to make?”, really should be
the one that drives all others.
10. Maintaining the illusion of continuous
quality
• Continual repair operates on multiple levels:
• Keeping the promises you’ve made by repairing the failures that inevitably
plague them
• Improving your ability to keep the promises you’ve made by evolving your
existing repair mechanisms
• Improving the quality of your service as a whole by repairing failures due to
making the wrong promises
11. Service
• One could define service as “a strongly stated intention to provide
benefit.” Service is continual; its quality is judged and must be
continually maintained.
