Service Marketing Strategy in Ark Company.

Service marketing strategies are widely used by different service providers. Depending on unique service characteristic it is very important to define appropriate strategy and ways of managing business in travel industry. This industry is very profitable, especially for Republic of Kazakhstan, and attracting more customers from foreign countries and meeting their expectations are main tasks for country's marketers.

Lets take Kazakhstan Company Ð'- Ark. It functionates in tourism and travel industry. Ark Company is a Kazakhstan private company established in 1995. It currently employs a staff of 38 experienced specialists and has office spaces in downtown Almaty and Pavlodar City. The major activity is creating a tourism infrastructure and organizing group and individual tours to the Kazakh part of the Great Silk Road. Ark Company offers a wide range of services in the area of tourism: visa support and registration, transportation, translation, accommodation in hotels, a large selection of tours in Almaty and its outskirts. It arranges various types of tours, including business, recreational and hunting tours, for incoming foreign travelers. Regarding the business tours, company's office equipped with all necessary reservation and business systems to work as Travel Agency. Ark Company can offer the following Corporate Travel Services: domestic and international air tickets, hotels in Almaty with negotiated rates by the direct contracts. (The Regent, Hyatt Regency, Astana, Otrar, Dostyk and many others with the lower class), hotels in the other regions of Kazakhstan, car rental and transfers, VIP services, airport meet and greet, assistance in organizing conferences and meetings, sightseeing, excursions. The company owns a recreation center "Arktur" near Alakol Lake, a tourist center in Almaty region and a guest's lodge in a beautiful ravine on the territory of Ile-Alatau National Park. Besides the services in the field of tourism the Company has a subsidiary that provides railway freight forwarding services in Kazakhstan, CIS and abroad. The company works on the local (60 percent), regional (30 percent), and international (10 percent) markets. It is experienced in doing business internationally and possesses cooperation contracts with travel companies in Turkey, Latvia and China.

There are a lot of different concepts using by service marketers, but their correct usage will appreciably improve Ark Company image. After successful implementing of the following it should try to find another strategies corresponding to traveling industry characteristics:

1. Service innovations. Services are usually defined by a limited number of constitutive characteristics: a) its lack of materiality; b) the concomitance of service creation and consumption; c) the integration of an external factor in the service creation can be viewed as central characteristic identifying service. As a direct consequence of these specific services attributes, the consumer's ability to evaluate a service a priori is limited and evaluations are mainly based on consumption experiences. As to service innovations this is not possible because no experience exist. In exhibit #1 we can see that customers` buying decision in favor of an innovative service determine its market success. Customers` buying decisions are based on information about existence and quality of the new service, which are transmitted via the service provider's communication activities or non-company communication. In this general framework of service innovations` success is applied to a single service sector, traveling. For Ark Company it is suitable to present absolutely new types of service, for example: extreme trips in Kazakhstani mountains, but it should create approximate customer`s expectations about this type of service.

2. Incentive-compatible pricing. Customer always ignores effect of his choice on the delay costs incurred by other customers and chooses a lower effort level, resulting in a smaller service rate. Although customers are homogeneous with all the characteristics known to the facility manager, a moral hazard problem arises because effort level and service rate are neither observable nor verifiable ex-post. To provide incentives for customers to speed up, one obvious way for Ark Company is to charge a price that is increasing in the observed service time. This variable price should be high enough to induce the customers to choose the net-value maximizing service rate.

3. Measuring service quality. It is important for Ark Company to have efficient conception of its service quality that is based on a comparison between what the customer fells should be offered and what is provided. The difference between expected and perceived service is termed Gap 5. This customer-perceived service quality shortcoming, Gap 5, is the result of four service provider shortfalls.