Employees in services: the most valuable asset?

Before moving on to discussing the role of employees in services, we believe that it is important to differentiate between products and services. Services in the simplest terms are facts, processes and actions. Services can also be defined as any activity or benefit that one party offers to another that is essentially intangible and does not result in ownership of anything. [1]. These simple definitions give us a good idea of ​​what services are. We can give examples of hairdresser, tailor or restaurant as services. Products, on the other hand, are offerings that are tangible in nature, such as a car.

In today’s world, services are increasingly important in the economy of any country. As Louis V. Gerstner said in 2001, “services will move in this decade to become the forefront of the industry.” This quote comes from the former CEO of a company claiming to be the world’s largest services company, IBM. The importance of services in today’s world can be further emphasized by the fact that services comprised almost 80% of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America in 2003 [2].

If we speak in the Pakistani context, we can see that the structure of the Pakistani economy has changed from a primarily agricultural base to a solid service base. Agriculture now only accounts for about 20% of GDP, while the service sector accounts for 53% of GDP and wholesale and retail trade accounts for 30% of this sector. [3]. This fact also requires that more work be done on the commercialization of services for an adequate growth of the sector.

Now that we know the difference and importance of services, we would like to shed some light on the difference between product marketing and service marketing. Many seasoned marketers think that service marketing is different from product marketing. This was discovered by Gary Knisely, director of the consulting firm Johnson Smith and Knisely, in 1979 when he interviewed several high-ranking marketing executives who had gone to work in the consumer services industry after extensive experience in the consumer services industry. consumer packaged goods. Generally, 4 P’s are considered in packaged product marketing, namely Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. But when we talk about services, it is believed that there are three additional P’s that need to be considered for service marketing, namely People, Processes, and Physical Evidence. [4].

The fifth P ie People includes both employees and customers, as customers also play an important role in the service delivery process. But we’re going to focus on the employees in regards to this article. From the above discussion, it is obvious that employees play an important role in service marketing due to the varied reason that employees are involved in the delivery process of any service, for example a waiter in a restaurant is in actually the driver of the entire customer-related process. So it is of great importance that you give the customer the right image, otherwise the customer may never come back. So those employees who are part of the service delivery, we can call them customer contact service employees, play an absolutely crucial role in building a reputation for any service.

The importance of customer service employees can be understood from the following statements, which will also show why employees can be the most valuable asset of a service organization. Customer Service Employees are very important because:

or are they the service

o They are the organization in the eyes of the client

or are they the brand

or are they marketers [4]

In many cases, in a service, there is only the employee and nothing else, that is, the employee is the service, for example, haircut, physical trainers, legal services, etc. This means that the service offered by the company is the employee. Therefore, investing in the employee is the same as investing in the manufacture of a product.

A customer service employee can reflect the image of the service organization even if it is not directly providing the required service. If you enter a hospital, every employee you encounter, from the receptionist to the secretary, can influence your opinion of that organization. Therefore, employees sometimes become the organization in the eyes of the customer.

Employees also become the brand of a service. A very good example can be a university that enjoys a good reputation among students. The quality of most universities is judged by the caliber of the professors who teach there. When a student interacts with a professor, he has positive emotions about the university only when he feels that the professor is well-informed and understanding and has full control over his subject. We can say that one of the reasons, among others, why LUMS is thought to be better than other universities is due to the perception that its faculty has more PhDs than any other university, which is why it has a better educational quality than other Thus, an employee also becomes the brand of a service.

Since contact employees represent the organization and can directly influence customer satisfaction, they play the role of marketers. They physically embody service and are traveling billboards from a promotional point of view. [4] If we are on the road and we see a person sitting on a motorcycle, who is going to deliver a free delivery, or deliver letters or documents, we can tell by their appearance, clothing or even type of vehicle to which organization they belong. Therefore, even when the service employees are simply doing their duty, they act as marketers for your organization.

Here we would like to refer to Mr. Dennis Harting, who says “What is the most valuable asset a company has? Is it the name, the customers, the goodwill, the physical resources or the product line? The answer is that is none of these. The most valuable resource of a company is its employees. Any organization will go as far as the people who run it. In fact, a company is actually a group of people who interact with a common purpose. organization “. [5].

It also states that “it is important for managers and owners to begin to realize that employees are the most valuable asset any organization can have. Those who embrace this new business model will structure their compensation and bonus program to reflect this belief.” .

The above discussion only points to one thing, generally for every business, and particularly for any service business, employees are definitely the most valuable assets. Personally, we believe that employees in Pakistan are still not given the right place and importance. One feels that more and more attention should be paid to the role of employees in services and investments should be made to enhance the most valuable asset of services.