Service Plan

SERVICE PLAN FOR ProfessionalTours

INTRODUCTION

ProfessionalTours is a tour operator that arranges holidays for overseas visitors to South Africa. A recent survey undertaken by ProfessionalTours has shown that there is a need for ProfessionalTours to have a service plan.

The ingredients of a service plan such as setting service standards, defining service quality, deployment of service employees, providing supporting activities, systems and procedures, service culture as well as the service information system will be discussed in detail in order to assist ProfessionalTours to streamline their service plan.

THE SERVICE PLAN

1. Setting service standards

a. Targets should be formal – ProfessionalTours needs to have set targets. These targets should be quantitative. These should include:

i. Answering a call within three rings

ii. Respond to online enquiries within 12 hours

iii. Sending a quote within 24 hours

b. Services should be standardised as far as possible – instead of doing all quotations manually, ProfessionalTours can give their customers an option of co-ordinating their own trip online via their website. This will need to ensure that the website is updated and the prices are clearly indicated and ensure that their prices are market related. Standardising the quotation process also frees up time for the agents to pay attention on other duties that cannot be done electronically.

c. Targets should be set from a customer’s perspective – ProfessionalTours already commissioned a market research company to conduct a survey amongst its customers that have travelled to South Africa in the past. The survey assisted ProfessionalTours in identifying which service dimension were particularly important to the customers so as to focus on services that are important to their customers. The results of the research have been received. This has prompted ProfessionalTours to develop a service plan.

d. The customer’s requirements should be...