Part 1 Dissatisfying Service incident 2 * Circumstances Leading to the Incident 2 * What Occurred During the Incident 2 * What made the Incident dissatisfying 3 * What could or should have been done differently 3

Part 2 Critical Incident Analysis 4

* The customer gap 4 * Type of encounters that occurred 4 * Source of displeasure/pleasure 4 * Dimensions of the servqual scale 5 * Reliability 5 * Responsiveness 5 * Assurance 5 * Empathy 6
Provider gap 1 The listening gap 6 * Inadequate service recovery 6
Provider gap 2 Service designs & standard gap 6 * Poor service design 6
Provider gap 4 The communication gap 7 * Ineffective management of customer expectations 7 * Inappropriate pricing 7

Part 3 Recommendations to the service provider 8 * Recommendation for Provider gap 1 8 * Recommendation for Provider gap 2 9 * Recommendation for Provider gap 4 9 * Conclusion 10

References 11

Critical Incident Report

Part 1. Critical Incident Description:
Service incident description * Name of firm/Organisation: EBay * Type of service: E-commerce * Date and time: 2/4/12, approximately 15.30

Circumstances Leading to the Incident
I started selling products on EBay store and it was really successful, so I decided to start a second store to sell electronic products. I registered a new account on EBay, to activate the account I had to confirm my details through a telephone notification system that gave me the activation code for the account. After many attempts to activate the code I had not received a call from EBay, so I thought that there was an error with my account. I tried to call EBay customer support service in Australia however I soon discovered that there was no customer support service within Australia. The closest to a customer support service was an answering machine that specified that if you had any problems, to email EBay.

After an hour of trying to locate an actual customer service representative for Ebay that could assist me with this issue, I had accepted that EBay had no recovery service in place, only a simple answering machine giving customers senseless direction. I eventually sent EBay an email and waited for a week and there was still no reply.

With no other choice, I decided to create another store account and the same problem had occurred again. I received a notification from EBay the next day,which stated that all of my accounts had been cancelled indefinitely. Refer to appendix A.

What Occurred During the Incident
I decided to contact EBay’s customer support service in America by phone the next day. After following the prompts I finally got to speak to a customer service operator, her name was Emma. I explained my situation for about two minutes then Emma put me on hold and said she will investigate the problem. I was on hold for another twenty minutes, which I thought it was too long to be put on hold. Emma finally returned to the line with some information; she stated that my account was cancelled due to an automatic security system on EBay that had detected fraudulent activities on my store account. I clarified that I had never committed any fraud on EBay and that I had perfect customer feedback score on my record. I then explained to Emma that I wanted to open a second store but could not activate my account and whether this is what had triggered the security alert. She basically ignored everything I said, and then said that EBay’s decision was final. I felt helpless because this store took me a long time to build and I had regular customers buying from my store. I asked Emma if she could tell me exactly what EBay policy I had broken, she then simply said that this information was private and could not be discussed with me. She then started acting really