Abstract
"Service organizations differ in many important ways from manufacturing businesses and require a distinctive approach to planning and implementing marketing strategy." In this paper, we discuss various aspects of service organizations. Service by nature is intangible, and cannot be physically transferred and kept from the service providers to its customers (Berry, 1986). This means the offering and consumption of service are inseparable. Service also cannot be stored for future use. This feature is called the perishability of service. Another major concern in service business is that the quality of a service provided can vary significantly from one producer to another, from one customer to another, and even from day to day. The difficulty in standardizing the output of service reflects its heterogeneous nature (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry, 1985). Intangibility, inseparability, perishability, and heterogeneity, are the distinctive characteristics of service contrast with the tangible nature of goods produced in manufacturing industry. These attributes make it difficult or even impossible sometimes for the customers to tangibly compare and evaluate the performance and quality of the service they are receiving.
