Quality management of sustainable services

Buy your own car or become a member of a car-sharing provider? Purchase conventional electricity or spend a little more on solar power? If you want to use a sustainable service, you have to change your behaviour - and in most cases you have to take on extra work. What constitutes a high quality of service under these difficult conditions is the question that needs to be answered. A research project funded by the Federal Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) has addressed this question. HitchHike, Mobility, Schwendimann and Rhiienergie participated as partner companies. Analogous to classic services, it is also true for sustainable services that the quality must correspond to the wishes and requirements of the customers. Therefore, in a first step, the expectations of the customers were determined before instructions for measuring and improving the quality of sustainable services were derived.

Customer expectations: three quality areas
Based on the results of qualitative interviews and written surveys with over 600 customers and potential customers of the partner companies, three quality areas of sustainable services could be derived (Figure 1).

1)Functional quality: Core performance and customer service must be right. This is about the practical benefits of the core service, for example getting from A to B quickly (sustainable mobility) or disposing of waste quickly and in a relaxed manner (recycling). Customer service, i.e. good personal advice and information from the provider, is also part of the functional quality expectation. Only in terms of price are customers willing to compromise; price advantages are not among the expectations that customers have of sustainable services.
2)Emotional quality: The sustainable service should offer an experience. In order to overcome one's own inertia and change habitual behaviour ("You should use your own car less, but..."), the sustainable service should motivate and emotionally activate the customer through its emotional quality. It is just as important to ensure enthusiasm for the idea itself ("I think electric cars are smart...") as it is to strengthen trust in the provider ("At Schwendimann I know that they have everything under control...").Emotional quality: The sustainable service should offer an experience. In order to overcome one's own inertia and change habitual behaviour ("You should use your own car less, but..."), the sustainable service should motivate and emotionally activate the customer through its emotional quality. It is just as important to ensure enthusiasm for the idea itself ("I think electric cars are smart...") as it is to strengthen trust in the provider ("With Schwendimann, I know that they have everything under control...").
3)Value-based quality: confirm personal convictions. In the case of value-based quality, customers want to feel clearly that they are actively contributing to society and to the preservation of the environment by using sustainable services. At the same time, this is linked to personal values such as "progress" and openness to innovation. The target group of sustainable services thus sees itself as an innovation-promoting consumer and citizen who wants to set a good example.

Due to the expectations in all three areas, meeting a quality promise in sustainable services is particularly demanding. The service process must be "good", "pleasant" and "meaningful". However, the results of the study also show that the importance of functional compared to emotional or meaningful quality is not the same in all situations. For one thing, market maturity plays a role here. If, as in the case of car pooling, the market is at a very early stage and the service is hardly known to many customers, "emotions", i.e. enthusiasm for the idea itself and sense-making, play a major role. The more mature the market and the more providers are already established, the more important the functional quality of the core service and customer service becomes. On the other hand, the expectations of existing customers are different compared to new customers. New customers tend towards "demand inflation". They express very high quality expectations, but are then not prepared to adjust their behaviour in favour of sustainable services. The gap between good intentions and actual behaviour is therefore particularly clear here. With existing customers, on the other hand, it is possible to draw more reliable conclusions from the quality assessment to the purchasing behaviour. For example, the recycling company Schwendimann succeeds in fully meeting or even exceeding the expectations of 72% of the customers surveyed (value 7 on a scale of 7). The high quality is rewarded, as 56% of the customers state that they visit the depots at least once a month or once a week to recycle.

Managing the quality of sustainable services
Once the quality expectations from the customer's point of view have been determined, the fulfilment of the demands by the existing offer should be checked. Within the framework of our study, an instrument was first developed for self-assessment by the company (Figure 2). With the help of four "Power Questions" on each of the three quality areas "Functions", "Emotions" and "Values", the need for action can be assessed. The traffic light system provides a reliable initial diagnosis. If the average values in all three quality areas are at least 5.5 (7-point scale), no need for action is indicated. The quality promise of sustainable service meets customer expectations. Average values between 4.1 and 5.4 or even between 1 and 4, on the other hand, indicate a medium or large need for optimization. In the example shown, this applies to both functional quality (yellow = medium value) and emotional quality (red = low value). Here, new quality goals should first be set and measures introduced for implementation. For the provider of a ridesharing service, for example, it can be very important that customers feel emotionally part of a network of like-minded people and have the necessary trust (emotional quality). The platform Hitch Hike, a partner of the project, ensures this by not acting as an intermediary of ridesharing services itself, but its business customers. When the platform appears in the protected area of colleges, companies or residential areas, trust and emotional belonging to the customer network is strengthened. Special attention should also be paid to possible shortcomings in the functional quality of the core service. A common example is a higher time requirement of the sustainable service compared to the non-sustainable alternative. The partner company Schwendimann operates the waste collection point concept "brings" as a franchise solution together with partners. In order to secure time advantages for the active recycling customers, they can recycle everything in one place (saves several trips) and have freer disposal of their time due to the long opening hours. In addition, they are currently looking at introducing a collection service which would secure further time savings. Through the use of technology, the customer (ordering app) would be directly connected to the service partners (transport companies, waste collection point operators).

Finally, the answers to two further questions are also included in the overall result. Thus, the self-test additionally checks how mature the market of the sustainable services under consideration is and how important customer acquisition is in relation to the maintenance of existing customer relationships. The answers lead to a different weighting of the three partial quality values. Although the self-assessment test can provide a good basis for managing the quality of sustainable services, it does not replace the subsequent customer survey. When measuring from the customer's point of view, it is important that questions on quality characteristics from all three areas are taken into account: functional benefit, emotional and value-related quality. Conclusion The cross-sector trend towards sustainable services is in line with the wishes of today's consumers. It is foreseeable that demand will continue to rise in the future. Already today, numerous innovative service offerings are emerging in areas such as "sharing instead of ownership", "digital instead of paper", "repair instead of replace" or "recycle instead of throw away". Quality management as an integral part of customer-oriented corporate management must respond to this development. Established instruments for quality planning, implementation and measurement must be adapted to the special expectations of customers for sustainable services. The three quality areas and the instrument for quality measurement aim to make a contribution here