To be a winner in the international maritime transportation market through tough competition, a national maritime transportation company should concentrate on enhancing competitive power.
So far in the maritime business, the concept of administration of marketing or strategies have not been introduced or executed properly. However, if a ocean transportation business wants to differentiate its competitive power, it sure has to introduce and utilize marketing strategies and theories. This study targeted on this point.
An analysis has been made to causes and types of service failures which inevitably occur during the process of providing maritime transportation service to national forwarders(intermediaries of inland and sea transportation service), the principal customer of shipping company. Further an investigation on what strategies about service failures should be adopeted has been done if the shipping companies want to efficiently turn complaints of customers into satisfaction. In addition, it is demonstrated on how customer preference can be enhanced through customer satisfaction. Through these investigations suggestions are made on how to enhance competitiveness of national shipping companies which is the theme of this study.
This research was done as follows
(1) A survey was made on 500 employees of top 150 national forwarders, who have been in charge of sales or marine transportation.
(2) By referring to documentary data from previous researches, the theoretical outline was established and it was modeled and used as a frame of demonstration.
(3) The effect of service failure on customers in terms of service recovery was examined.
(4) It is analysed that which types of marine transportation failure have effects on customer satisfaction in close correlation to efforts to recover from the failures.
(5) It is examined that which customer satisfaction from each strategy has an effect on customer preference.
After demonstrating survey results accroding to research model, the following conclusions and implications ard made:
First, efforts of shipping companies to recover from service failures have positive effects on customer satisfaction. Expecially, fairness of result has priority over procedural or interactional factors in the national forwarder companies.
Secondly, since the positive effect of customer satisfaction on customer preference is significant, shipping companies have to strategically manage customer satisfaction to increase customer preference.
Thirdly, each type of service failures interacting with efforts to recover from them has positive effect on customer satisfaction. Shipping companies, therefore, have to segment service failures considering various demands of customers, manage them systematically, and conceive customary recovery efforts to each service failure type.