During this last part of the course, we are going to focus on different tips that are useful for a manager of cultural institution to run, in a more efficient and effective and economic way, the business. The first construct that I would like to point the focus on is the customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction, we know, from the previous lectures, that it is the result of a comparison between what a consumer expects and what the consumer perceives. I develop, in my mind through the importance of the opinions of my friends, word of mouth, and the suggestions that they give me, an idea of the museum I am going to visit. I have personal needs, I want, for example, to enter into a more specific relationship with Egyptian art, and I was told by many friends that the museum of Ancient Egypt is worth seeing, so I enter with a lot of expectations. I expect to live a visit that will satisfy my needs. During the visit I develop some opinions, and when I go out from the museum I compare what I expected with what I perceived. This is a definition, the basic definition of what customer satisfaction is. If the perception is higher than the expectation, I will be satisfied. If I perceive something that is of a lower level than what I expected to live, I will not be satisfied. Well, now we give as extra something. We talked about this in a different moment but how an institution can develop research in order to understand what happened that created the dissatisfaction of a customer. We have, in museums, customer surveys asking if you are satisfied or not. We realized that our visitors are not satisfied. We made a new program for the theater and people are participating, the audience is coming, they buy the ticket, but they are not satisfied with the concert that I perform. Why? Whose fault is it? What was the problem that generated all these sentiments and increased dissatisfaction? Parasuraman is one of the main academics that studied the importance of service and service delivery and the concept of value and quality, he started to develop a model called the Gap Model that can be very useful for every institution and business, and I do think it is also very effective for cultural institutions that allows you to understand what the part is in the value creation that is missing, that is not working properly, and that is in need to be taken care of and focused on in order to solve the problem that generated the final dissatisfaction. The Gap Model is quiet easy. The Gap Model says says that there is a gap between what I expect and what I perceive which is the Value Gap, the biggest generator of dissatisfaction, but behind this Value Gap, there are many other elements, many other gaps that can be generated during the process. We know that we have, on one side, the consumer, on the other side we have the market and or the company. The meeting between the two, so the exact moment of consumption and purchase generates satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The Value Gap is the gap that generates this dissatisfaction or satisfaction. What is behind the Value Gaps? First of all, we have the so-called Consistency Gap. Imagine that we decide to organize, in the program of a theatre, a particular concert or a particular genre of music, or in a museum, we decided to organize, to set up an exhibition of art on a topic that is not so requested or so famous in the market; so the market is not interested in this topic. The Consistency Gap says that the perception of the manager of the consumer expectation is not aligned with what the consumer actually needs. The problem is that, in this case, the company does not have any idea of what the market wants. In a way, if we make a connection with what we said at the beginning, with product orientation and market orientation, in this case we have a focus on the product orientation. We produce something that does not take into consideration what the market wants. Keeping an eye on the market is very useful in these cases because if you create something, if you create an exhibition of art, if you create the program of the season of the theater without considering what the trends of the market are, you will never meet their needs, and so that will be this consistency gap that if it is not observed and cared for in a proper way will eventually generate the final value gap. But what happens when a manager has a proper perception of what customers want, so there is no consistency gap? Maybe there is another gap called the perception gap. So the idea is, in this case, the manager understands what the customer wants, but he or she is not able to transform this need into a proper offer. A resident of a city looks for something to be pleased by, to enjoy, and to use to escape from ordinary life, and so they want a performance in a theatre that is happy, pleasurable, and cheerful. This is something that the manager understands, but he or she is not able, the artistic director in this case, to produce, create, and define what is a suitable performance to be put on the program of a theater. This is a perception gap. Third step, the manager understands what the market wants. The manager is able to translate this request into a proper offer, but inside the institution, the manager is not able to transfer this offer, this concept to the minds of all the staff, the people that work in the institution. This is a typical example, a very common example of a gap system in cultural institutions, museums, theaters. We have a very enlightened and performant director with a good idea of what is the mission, the positioning, the segmentation of the market of their institution, but there is a huge number of staff that is not aligned with what the manager wants. Maybe the director is focused on the relation with the customer, but all the people that are working with him, the ticket office department, the security guards in the rooms of a museum, the ushers in a theater do not understand, for example, that the customer relationship is very important, while the director instead thinks it is. This is a problem of alignment, and so we are now facing the alignment gap. Well, now we arrive to the last one. We have a problem of dissatisfaction, a value gap; but we do not have a consistency gap, no discrepancy between the manager's perception and the expectation of the consumer; no perception gap, so the manager is able to transform what the customer wants into a proper offer; no alignment gap, that means that the manager is able to transform, translate, and transfer his or her idea to the staff; but finally the consumer is not perceiving what he or she expects. What is the problem? It is a problem of communication. It is a problem of communication so there is the last part of the delivery of the service, the exact contact between what is produced and what is communicated that does not work properly. We are now facing the last gap which is the communication gap. What did we learn from this lesson? We learned how important it is to enter into detail about the causes of customer satisfaction, enter into detail about when the customer is not satisfied, what is the reason? In order to do so, we need to simply to conduct a survey or a set of different interviews with all the actors that are taking part in the customer value proposition and mainly in the production of the service delivery to the customer. Are your customers satisfied? What is the idea of the management? What is the idea of the customer value of the staff? How is this value communicated? And finally, we understand that the original value gap is nothing else but the sum of different steps of relationships that of course during the life of a company and of course in the cultural institution.
