Hitesh Bhasin, in his blog from Marketing91, outlines how to conduct a Service Gap Analysis. A service gap is the difference between what the customers expect and what they perceived was delivered.

This is based on a Gap Model. The Gap Model identifies six types of gaps that can occur along the way from the design to delivery of a service. Hitesh defines the gaps and lists potential reasons for their existence.

Gap 1: Knowledge Gap — Between customer needs and expectations and management’s perception of the needs

Gap 2: Standards Gap — Between management definition of customer needs and the translation of those into design and delivery specifications

Gap 3: Delivery Gap — Between design or delivery specifications and execution of design or delivery specifications

Gap 4: Communication Gap — Between execution of design or delivery specifications and advertising and sales promotion

Gap 5: Perception Gap — Between design delivery specification and the customer perception of product execution

Gap 6: Service Gap — Between customer experience in relation to expectations

You can view Hitesh’s video here.

Any of the gaps can lead to a service failure, where performance fails to meet customer expectations. Hitesh discusses how to recover from a service failure in the following video.