Winners of SMI Service Blueprint Student Competition Announced

Learning about service marketing goes beyond the typical classroom materials.  Dr. Dwayne Gremler’s Service Marketing course (MKT 4050) requires teams of students to go out into the local community and find a services-oriented business or organization to study customer and employee interactions.  Then the students prepare a detailed service blueprint as a graded assignment and winners selected by Dr. Gremler.

This fall, the classroom competition expanded to include the BGSU Service Marketing Institute (SMI) which organized the competition, moved it to the Bowen-Thompson Student Union, lined up judges, and enhanced the prize levels. The top four service blueprint teams were selected in early November and those teams competed in the first SMI Service Blueprint Competition at BGSU. The teams had 10 minutes to present the highlights of their service blueprints and service improvement recommendations to a panel of judges.

The winning team included Lindsay Garwood, Toni Iverson, Rebecca Hartman, Maria Buettner and Jane Swartz who performed a service blueprint analysis on the BGSU Campus Tour Service. They are pictured with Dr. Gremler.

This service blueprint assignment allows students to demonstrate an understanding of the blueprint concepts from class and the ability to apply them. Students were required to visit the business/organization they chose to visually capture the different steps (customer or employee actions) of the service delivery process and the various components of physical evidence that customers experience.

“In addition to discussing what a service blueprint is,” states Dr. Gremler, “this assignment gives students practical experience in using this tool.  The tool can be used to understand any service delivery process.  Students frequently report that when the discussion of the service blueprint comes up in a job interview, the interviewer often finds the discussion very intriguing.  Occasionally students report that they have received an internship or a job offer because of their ability to discuss what this tool is and how it might be used by the hiring firm.”

Judges for the competition included representatives from companies which sponsor the BGSU sales program. They included Adam Maidment, Marathon Petroleum Co.; Alisha Roberts, Quicken Loans; Jerry Foy, Liberty Mutual; Morgan Deaton, Total Quality Logistics (TQL); and Dash Yost, Tom James Company.

This inaugural competition was organized by SMI associate director Ms. Christine Seiler.