MRKT 4503 Week 2 Customer Expectations Brief Example

The Standard Set Before the First Lesson: An Expectations Brief for Two Driving School Buyer Groups, Mapping Desired and Adequate Service and the Zone of Tolerance on Four Attributes

Student Name

Walden University

MRKT 4503: Strategic Services Marketing

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Standard Set Before the First Lesson: An Expectations Brief for Two Driving School Buyer Groups, Mapping Desired and Adequate Service and the Zone of Tolerance on Four Attributes

Purpose

Every learner who books with Steady Wheel Driving School arrives with a standard already in mind. That standard, not the school's own view of a good lesson, is what the lesson will be judged against. This brief records the expectations of the school's two main buyer groups: parents paying for a teenage learner, and adults learning to drive later in life, often after moving to an area without good public transit or after years of relying on someone else. For each group it sets out what buyers hope for on four attributes, the lowest level they will accept without complaining and where those expectations come from. Zeithaml et al. (1993) distinguished desired service, what customers hope to receive, from adequate service, the minimum they will accept, and called the range between them the zone of tolerance.

Method

The attributes and levels come from three sources in the case: forty online reviews of the school and two rivals, eight short conversations the branch managers held with parents and adult learners at sign-up, and the school's own complaint log for the past year. The levels are composite and illustrative. They describe patterns, not precise measurements. The four attributes were chosen because they appeared most often in reviews and complaints: punctuality, the instructor's manner, feedback and readiness for the road test. Price was mentioned often too, but mainly before purchase, so it is treated in the pricing note later in the course rather than here. The two buyer groups were separated because their reviews read so differently. Parents write about their teenager's confidence and safety, and about whether they were kept informed. Adult learners write about their own nerves, their schedules and whether the instructor treated them as capable adults.

Expectations of Parents

Table 1

Desired and Adequate Service for Parents of Teenage Learners

Composite school. Levels are illustrative patterns from reviews and sign-up conversations.

Expectations of Adult Learners

Adult learners share some of these standards and differ sharply on others, so their expectations are set out separately.

Table 2

Desired and Adequate Service for Adult Learners

Composite school. Adult learners' road-test zone is wide because they expect to need varying amounts of practice.

What the Zones Show

Two zones are narrow for both groups, and those are where the school is most exposed. The first is the instructor's manner in traffic. Parents' adequate level is set by the fear of a harsh instructor, often based on a friend's story; adults' adequate level is set by embarrassment. Neither group will tolerate much impatience. Parasuraman et al. (1994) found that customers' zones of tolerance were narrower for outcome-related and reliability attributes, where failures are most noticed, than for others.

The second narrow zone is parents' expectation of road-test readiness. Here the school helped create the problem. Its website promises learners will be "road-ready in six lessons," and parents read that as a commitment. Zeithaml et al. (1993) identified explicit service promises, such as advertising, as one of the strongest influences on expectations. The promise raised parents' adequate level to the point where one extra lesson, which is ordinary for many learners, feels like a failure.

Where zones are wide, the school has room. Parents care less about the form of feedback than about the result, and adults expect to need varying amounts of practice. These are not places to spend money.

Where the Expectations Come From

Expectations come from four places: the school's own promises, other services, friends' accounts and the buyer's own situation. Only the first is under the school's direct control. That makes it the most useful lever, and the gap analysis that follows will need to decide whether the "six lessons" promise should be changed or kept and backed with better delivery.

Implications

The school should treat instructor manner and on-time arrival as non-negotiable for both groups, since both zones are narrow. It should reconsider the "road-ready in six lessons" promise, which has narrowed parents' tolerance on the attribute where outcomes vary most. And it should not invest heavily in written feedback for parents, which buyers value but will forgive. Wirtz and Lovelock (2016) note that managing expectations is often cheaper than raising performance; the six-lesson promise is the clearest place to test that idea.

References

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1994). Reassessment of expectations as a comparison standard in measuring service quality: Implications for further research. Journal of Marketing, 58(1), 111-124. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299405800109

Wirtz, J., & Lovelock, C. (2016). Services marketing: People, technology, strategy (8th ed.). World Scientific.

Zeithaml, V. A., Berry, L. L., & Parasuraman, A. (1993). The nature and determinants of customer expectations of service. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 21(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070393211001