Submit a short response to the following questions: 

• How is technology changing the nature of customer service and service offerings?
• Which of the four provider gaps do you believe is hardest to close? 
• Why?

Post a brief summary of your key learnings (no more than a paragraph or two in length for each question). 

After submitting your response to this assignment, comment on your peers discussion response.

Peer response 1: How is technology changing the nature of customer service and service offerings?

With the emergence of the telephone, and then, the internet, customer service, and service offerings changed dramatically. The telephone allowed for a partial replacement of physical face-to-face conversations with over-the-phone conversations that made customer service more consolidated (e.g., call center) and easier to improve (by means of listening to call recordings). With the emergence of the internet, customer service now can be conducted without the presence of a human (e.g., chatbot or FAQ) or by means of email, and chat systems. This allows for more efficiency and more effective control of the customer service quality by the service providers (firms) as well as lower costs.

Service offerings changed primarily after the emergence of e-commerce and online shopping where the customer can get all the information about the services and purchase them online. For example, as opposed to calling a taxi, customers can use their phones to call Uber without speaking to a person. The app will determine the location of the customer, will provide an estimated time of arrival, and calculate the price.

Which of the four provider gaps do you believe is hardest to close? 

In my opinion, the hardest provider gap to close is the listening gap. Since service performance is one of the most crucial factors in customer perception, it’s hard to design a service that will be at an equilibrium of the profitable cost to the provider, hence the cost to the customer at which they will want to buy that service and will live up to the customer’s expectations. To determine the customer’s expectations, it’s necessary to obtain true feedback from the customers who most of the time leave unhappy without sharing such feedback. To resolve that, companies often utilize after-the-service surveys to let the customer evaluate the service received.