Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Service Across the Firm 4e

Successful businesses recognize that the development of strong customer relationships through quality service (and services) as well as implementing service strategies for competitive advantage are key to their success.


In its fourth European edition, Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus across the Firm provides full coverage of the foundations of services marketing, placing the distinctive Gaps model at the center of this approach. The new edition draws on the most recent research, and using up-to-date and topical examples, the book focuses on the development of customer relationships through service, outlining the core concepts and theories in services marketing today.


New and updated material in this new edition includes:
• New content related to human resource strategies, including coverage of the role of robots and chatbots for delivering customer-focused services.
• New coverage on listening to customers through research, big data, netnography and monitoring user-generated content.
• Increased technology, social media and digital coverage throughout the text, including the delivery of services using mobile and digital platforms, as well as through the Internet of Things.
• Brand new examples and case studies added from global and innovative companies including Turkish Airlines, Volvo, EasyJet and McDonalds.


Available with McGraw-Hill’s Connect®, the well-established online learning platform, which features our award-winning adaptive reading experience as well as resources to help faculty and institutions improve student outcomes and course delivery efficiency.

Alan Wilson is Professor of Marketing and Head of the Marketing Department within the University of Strathclyde Business School. He specializes in the marketing of services, has a PhD in the subject, and has been invited to deliver lectures and seminars on both services marketing and marketing research in a variety of countries throughout the world, to both student and executive audiences.

VALARIE ZEITHAML is Distinguished Professor of Marketing Emérita at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has devoted her career to researching and teaching service quality and services management. She is the co-author of Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, now in its 20th printing, and Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value Is Reshaping Corporate Strategy. In 2008, Dr. Zeithaml won the Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association. The award acknowledges enduring contributions to marketing through one or more journal articles, books, or a body of work. In 2009, she received the American Marketing Association/Irwin/McGraw Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award for lifetime leadership in marketing education and extensive contributions to the field of marketing. She also won the 2012 Bullard Research Impact Award in recognition of the broad impact of research on the field, industry, and society, and was appointed an American Marketing Association Lifetime Fellow in 2015. The 2014 List of Thomson Reuters included her in the “World's Most Influential Scientific Minds." reflecting citation data that identified those scholars who published the highest impact work.

MARY JO BITNER is an Emérita Professor of Marketing in the W. P. Carey School of Business. Arizona State University. USA. While at ASU she held the Edward M. Carson Chair in Service Marketing and was the Executive Director of the Center for Services Leadership at ASU. She has contributed over four decades of service research, publishing in leading marketing, service, and management journals and is recognized as one of the pioneers in service research globally. Her primary research foci arc customer―employee interactions, technology-delivered service, and customer satisfaction. Dr. Bitner has received a number of awards recognizing her pioneering work in the service discipline including the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) SERVSIG recognition for Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, an IBM Faculty Award, and ISSIP's inaugural Fellow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Service Science. She is an AMA Fellow and served on the AMA's Board of Trustees. She served four years as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Service Research. Dr. Bitner was a founder and board member of the global network for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM), a network committed to societal impact and usefulness in business research, where she remains involved.




DWAYNE D. GREMLER is professor of Marketing at Bowling Green State University. Dr. Gremler has been teaching Services Marketing courses for almost 30 years and has been identified as having taught more undergraduate classes on this subject during this time than anyone in the United States. He is the recipient of several national teaching awards. In 2015 Dr. Gremler was appointed Distinguished Teaching Professor by the Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees and in 2022 was also appointed as Distinguished Research Professor. Dr. Gremler has been invited to conduct seminars and present research in more than a dozen countries. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters and has received 16 awards for his research. He has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Service Research for nearly a decade and as chair of the American Marketing Association’s Services Marketing Special Interest Group. Dr. Gremler is a former Fulbright Scholar, having received a grant from the U.S. government to teach at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands, in spring 2006. In 2014 he received the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the AMA’s SERVSIG.