Service Industry Strategy

Executive Summary

Service industry strategies have been pivotal in enabling firms to make informed decisions to impact on excellent delivery of services. Customers are more concerned with effective services that satisfy their needs. In the contemporary world, customers are evolving following the transformation economy, which influences the changes in their lifestyles. As a result, there has been a need to examine their behavior and trends. This paper examines the current customer attitudes and service experience trends in light of the transformational economy shift. Moreover, there is an analysis of the potential conflicts in the macro and micro environments of the service-based industries, which the trends may cause. Based on the analysis, customer attitudes include the diversification of services, health consciousness, and excellent customer service. Also, the service experience trends include automated customer services, omnichannel experience and improvised personalization. However, the trends can cause miscommunication among departments, lawsuits for conflict with the government, rivalry with competitors, and poor strategy for targeting the right consumer. The conflicts can affect the growth and productivity of the Australian Museum and cause a loss of reputation. Nonetheless, it is recommendable for the Australian Museum to implement the following strategies.

1. The executive leadership team should adopt omnichannel loyalty programs.
2. The team should diversify its services by creating recreational facilities, restaurants, accommodations, and hotels to meet the different needs of the customers.
3. The executive leadership team should build a medical facility within the museum premises to meet the growing demand for the client’s health needs.

By implementing these strategies, the organization can eliminate the conflicts in its micro and macro environment to make informed decisions supporting its growth and productivity.

Introduction

Service industry strategy has been fundamental in enabling companies to make significant decisions in their delivery of services. According to Mahajan and Golahit (2019), the service strategy has to be formed to support satisfying customer expectations and drive long-term growth and success. In this case, a company’s service strategies support the customer experience to ensure that they remain loyal to the brand. The Australian museum must examine customer attitudes and service experience trends in service design planning since consumers keep evolving to change their lifestyles (Cheng et al., 2022). This contributes immensely to creating a customer persona that targets the audience. This paper analyzes the current consumer attitudes and service experience trends, the potential conflict in the macro and micro environment and the recommendations to address these potential conflicts in the service-based industries.

Analysis of The Current Consumer Attitudes and Service Experience Trends

Omnichannel marketing has been vital in focusing on consumers to provide them with a significant experience. As a result, it is necessary to examine the current consumer and service experience trends to provide goods and services that impact their satisfaction. The Australian Museum has diversified its service to provide customers with a new experience and create a significant hub where people from different locations can meet, interact, and promote tourism in the country. However, following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the consumers (tourists) have evolved, which has led to varying consumer attitudes and service experience trends. First, consumers are more concerned with the organization’s services and products meeting their needs (Maslova et al., 2020). Tourists are driven mainly by the Australian museum’s cultural aspects, which influence them to recommend other people to the area. Thus, the Australian Museum has to ensure that the wide range of services they offer provides the customers with an excellent experience. Second, consumers are evolving and prefer visiting places where they receive excellent customer service. This is significant as it promotes creating a good relationship with the consumers impacting brand advocacy and retaining customers (Rehman, Oikarinen, & Juntunen, 2022). With the tourists coming from different ethnic backgrounds, the Australian museum must ensure that they include various customer service units in various sections of the museum to provide the customers with an excellent experience. This will likely influence the tourists to revisit the museum and make referrals to other potential visitors, impacting the brand identity.

On the other hand, following the pandemic outbreak, consumers have become health conscious and are keen to ensure that the places they visit, observe and adhere to the Ministry of Health guidelines in the fight against Covid-19 (Cvirik et al., 2022). In the service design planning, the Australian Museum has to ensure that they adhere to the set health guideline since the customers are from different geographical locations. Therefore, in the service design planning, the Australian Museum has to consider the health needs of the tourist and the local customers, which can influence them to develop trust. Also, following the advancements in technology, automation has become paramount where the customers prefer to use software to make a decision based on their preferences. Therefore, the Australian Museum has to consider creating an application that can impact the easy movement of the customers in the museum and have most of their services automated. Moreover, there has been a transformational economy shift where customers base their activities on the internet. Thus, the Australian Museum must consider that most tourists are likely to get reviews about the organization through these social media platforms. This will influence the customers to interact with other loyal clients where they may obtain reviews and the most exciting sections to visit to meet their exploration needs. Moreover, considering the interaction needs of the consumers via these social media platforms impacts 360 marketing (Dwivedi et al., 2021). As a result, the information about the organization can reach the target consumer on multiple platforms.

In the service experience trends, there have been the trends of most customers requiring quick answers to some of the minor issues about an organization. Therefore, in the service delivery planning, the Australian museum should consider the automated means to use to answer the customers’ simple questions, such as using Chatbots (Shyju et al., 2021). This can save time for the organization and the customers and improve the customer experience. Based on the customer service theory, it is vital to identify consumer needs and satisfy them to exceed their expectation (Gyllenhammar, Eriksson, & Eriksson, 2022). In this case, the omnichannel experience has been a significant trend amongst consumers, who prefer contacting the organization through different channels. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that customers can contact Australian museums through various channels, such as phone calls, email, and social media. Lastly, the Australian museum needs to improvise on personalization which can significantly impact providing the customers with the experience they need. In the contemporary world, customers have evolved, expecting companies to spend their money on personalized experiences, such as suggesting products and services based on their purchase history (Shyju et al., 2021). Thus, the Australian museum must ensure that they collect the clients’ data and secure it to leverage their trend to provide them with the desired experience.

Potential Conflicts in The Macro and Micro Environment of Service-Based Industries

The microenvironment revolves around the environment the company has direct contact with, which affects routine activities (Singh, Sarangal, & Singh, 2021). The trend of the customer requiring excellent customer service influences the Australian museum to have different customer service units in each department. However, this may contribute to miscommunication amongst departments following the reliance on wrong information, which may arise from human errors. Also, the trends of omnichannel, improvised personalization and customer service might create potential conflicts with competitors over instances of imitation of services that meet the demands of the consumers (Wierzbicki & Nowodzinski, 2019). This can lead to lawsuits that may affect the reputation of the organization.

In the macro environment, the are uncontrollable external factors that may cause conflict in service-based industries. Customer trends influence the clients in Australian museums to have varying needs, which may create a potential conflict based on demographic aspects. It can lead to the lack of retention of some customers and loss of reputation. Furthermore, there may be conflicting strategies regarding the aspects of technology following the consumers’ trend on the use of social media platforms for interaction (Shyju et al.,2021). In this case, knowing the most effective social media platform to meet the target audience may be challenging. Lastly, the health-conscious trend may cause potential conflict in the political environment following the pressure from the government or pressure groups on the criticism of some of the health measures that the Australian museum may use.

Strategic Recommendation That Executive Leadership Team Can Adopt

1. The executive leadership team can adopt omnichannel loyalty programs. In this case, the customers have evolved from the traditional channels and transitioned to the digital ecosystem. Therefore, providing customers with convenience, relevance and value can limit conflicts arising from competitors and technological problems. It arises from the fact that the collection of customers’ information can influence the Australian museum organization to know the proper channels to use to reach their target audience, impacting omnichannel marketing. Also, omnichannel loyalty programs provide the opportunity of rewards loyal members, which prevents conflicts with competitors since the customers are likely to prefer the services the Australian Museum provides over other key players.
2. The executive leadership team should ensure that there is diversification in the museums. This calls for a wide range of services such as restaurants, libraries, hotels, recreational facilities and accommodation. It can prevent conflict with the customers for failing to meet their needs. With the customers coming from different geographical locations, they have different needs. Thus, the diversification of services creates a hub for the tourists to interact with one another which is part of their experience.
3. The executive leadership team can ensure they build a medical facility within the museum premises. This can significantly impact meeting the health needs of the customers. Moreover, the presence of healthcare experts in the medical facilities can prevent conflicts between the museum and the government and pressure groups since they can advocate for using the appropriate health measures within the Ministry of Health guidelines.

Conclusion

Service industry strategies are fundamental in supporting customer experience and loyalty. Current customer attitudes include diversification of services, excellent customer services and health consciousness. Moreover, the customer service experience trend entails technology, omnichannel and improvised personalization. Thus, the Australian museum needs to ensure that they meet these demands of their customer to avoid possible conflicts in the macro and microenvironment. These conflicts involve rivalry with competitors, criticism from government and pressure groups, and miscommunication amongst employees. However, the executive leadership groups can resolve these issues by adopting the omnichannel loyalty program, diversification and building a medical health facility. This will impact their good customer experience and loyalty.

References

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