– Danny Meyer, Founder of Shake Shack
We open with the account of a fictional patient instructed by his PCP to get a colonoscopy, followed six weeks later by a weekend getaway to Las Vegas with his spouse. Is it possible that insights gleaned from the latter could improve the patient experience with the former? We say, yes!
Consumers seek healthcare and hospitality services for fundamentally different reasons. Although the delivery of both entails similar types of customer engagement, it typically results in disparate customer sentiment. Why? Because hospitality service providers focus on the needs and concerns of the customer, while healthcare service providers focus on the needs and concerns of the service provider.
Consumer sentiment about these two different approaches to service delivery is evident in the degree of satisfaction they express with each of the five types of service providers measured in our GAP survey:
Note: the GAP Model of Service Quality (Figure 1.6) and RATER system mentioned in this chapter derive from two published articles that should have been referenced in the initial printing of the book:
Parasuraman, A., Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Leonard L. Berry. “A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research.” Journal of Marketing, 49, no. 4 (1985): 41–50.
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. “SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality.” Journal of Retailing, 64, (1988): 12–40.
