Service Matrix And Customer Contact

The services that go along with Lowe’s are pretty standardized for the most part. Checking out items is the same for every customer. It’s basically set up like an assembly line. There are several checkout stations, the customers line up next to the checkout stations and are dealt with in an assembly line fashion. Once they reach the employee at the counter they will check out their items. This system is highly standardized, very repetitive, simple, and gives the customer low decision making power. This was designed to deal with a large amount of customers in the quickest way using the least amount of time as possible. This process of highly standardized interaction with customers is classified on the service matrix as provider routed or standardized service and it matches the process that Lowes uses to interact with their customers perfectly. Since Lowe’s is a huge retail store it needs to use this service in order to deal with its huge demand. As mentioned before Lowe’s is in the process of becoming even more standardized as it eliminates some of the interaction between employees and customers and replaces that interaction with machines.
The self checkout systems are also effecting the way customers make contact with the company along with something that made an even more dramatic change in the way customers contact the company, the Internet. Traditionally when a customer would go to Lowe's to buy a product they would have a face to face type of customer contact where the employee could give basic information to the customer. This is a very high level of customer contact. There is a lot of room for customization, and change. While the productivity is low it can make the customer happy because they will get the information they want in making a purchase. Today this process has changed to the point where there is virtually no contact between employees and the customer. Today the process has changed so much that the customer doesn't even need to leave the house. Thanks to recently new inventions like the internet and the increasing use of computers in peoples everyday lives a lot of customers can buy just about anything on Lowe's website that they could at the actual store. In many cases the products online are actually cheaper than what they would cost in the store. The internet has really changed the way customer deal with companies in a huge way and the trend seems to be going more and more into shopping online everyday.