Service management – focus on customer experience

Abstract

The service management concept, developed by two concurrent schools (Nordic and American), emphasizes customer-focused management practices and relates to the fields of marketing, operations, organizational behaviour and human resource management. This chapter describes four main concepts forming the service management approach: collaboration both internally and externally, creating value to the customer, focus on quality and development of personnel. Research shows the correlation between service quality, value and customer satisfaction and quality between internal process and external service dependency. Moreover, it opens the discussion on how customer and employee behaviour affects overall organisational performance. This chapter provide examples of how workplace management research has applied service management concepts and argue that customer experience of joint service deliveries (in physical, digital and social environment) is the customer experience of the total workplace. The chapter also acknowledge the limitations of the service management concept, especially the lack of studies in human-machine encounters due to the fact of increasing technology’s role in workplace and services in general.