Undoubtedly, the greatest gap between customer expectations and service delivery exists when customers travel from one country to another. For example, in Japan the customer is supreme. At the morning opening of large department stores in Tokyo, sales personnel line up to welcome patrons and bow as they enter! When my team who could not speak Japanese visited Tokyo a few years back, as many as eight sales people willingly tried to help find the calligraphy pen. Although the pen was a low priced item, several attendants rushed from the counter to counter to find someone to translate, several others set out to find pens that might serve as the perfect gift, and still others searched for maps to other stores where the perfect pen could be found.

Because of the wonderful treatment Japanese customers are used to in their home country, they often have service expectations that exceed service delivery even when shopping in 'civilised countries' such as Great Britain. One Japanese tourist was puzzled and annoyed as he stood in a London department store while two shop assistants conversed instead of serving him. He left without buying anything. His annoyance is understandable when you realise the standard of service treatment in Japan.

Expectations of hotel service may also differ from one country to another. In the United States, a 'two star' designation for a hotel is generally interpreted to mean customers can expect guest rooms to be clean, beds to be comfortable, rooms to be sparsely decorated and equipped with some modern convenience such as a microwave oven, refrigerator, colour television, sofa bed, telephone, and coffee maker and the hotel to provide daily maid service. For such hotels the customer is not expecting (and does not want to pay for) luxury, extra service, beautiful spacious lobbies or room service availability but still wants to have a fairly decent, clean and safe place to stay. The hotel might also include a work desk, voice mail, high speed internet access in the room. However, experienced travellers to Great Britain would be very surprised to find this level of service at a two-star hotel in London.

Customers have had different customer expectations with hotel service in London. As an illustration a four-night hotel stay was booked for a family of four (including two children) at what was promised by a travel agent to be a two-star hotel. However, this London hotel did not meet the expectations of a two-star hotel. Instead, the hotel had rooms for a maximum of two people, slanting floors (and, therefore, beds), 24-inch-wide showers stalls, room entry doors that did not fully latch, hallways with no lights and a huge hole in the wall behind one toilet with insects coming and going as they pleased. In addition, the daily 'maid service' consisted of simply emptying the trash cans in the rooms and leaving the door to one of the rooms unlatched. No new towels or sheets were provided, and no cleaning of any kind was done in the room. Clearly the level of service did not match expectations, although seasoned European travellers were not surprised when the service was described to them especially for an expensive city like London. Their expectations of service are quite different from non-Europeans.

Questions:

2. How do customer expectations differ in the case study and why? Give relevant examples from the case study to support your answers.
4. According to the case study how does culture influence customer expectations. Give relevant examples from the case study to explain your answer.
6. Critically examine how service marketers can manage customer expectations of different clients. Give four reasons with examples to support your answer.