Define and give examples of the four characteristics of services: intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A service cannot be experienced through the physical senses. It cannot be seen, heard, tasted, felt, or smelled by a customer. This property represents the intangibility of services versus goods; goods can easily be experienced through the senses.

Even with the best efforts at enhancing a service's tangibility, a customer still can't really experience it until it is actually consumed. This characteristic represents the inseparability of a service-it is produced and consumed at the same time and cannot be separated from its provider. With physical goods, the familiar process is production, storage, sale, and then consumption. But with services, first the service is sold and then it is produced and consumed at the same time.

An offshoot of the inseparability issue, variability of a service means that because it can't be separated from the provider, a service's quality can only be as good as that of the provider him-/herself. Goods, in general, tend to be much more standardized than services because, once a firm has invested in continuous process improvement and quality control in its manufacturing operations, products flow off the line with very little variation. With services, continual investment in training, retraining, and good management of people is required if variability is to be consistently low.

If you schedule an appointment for a routine physical with your physician and then simply don't show up, the doctor loses the revenue from that time slot. That's perishability-the fact that a service can't be stored or saved up for future use.