CC Service Excellence

The service sector is the most important and fastest growing business sector of developed countries. Considering the composition of the world’s GDP by sectors, services contribute 63.6% and employ 41.9% of the total labor force according to “The World Factbook” of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These facts point out that we have to pay attention to services and the related research field of service science. Service science can be considered as an emerging multidisciplinary discipline focusing on the combination of fundamental science and engineering theories, models, and applications, aiming at enhancing and improving service innovation.

When it comes to the creation of service innovations there are two main generic approaches. On the one hand screening technical possibilities can be used to develop new service opportunities and on the other hand customer requests can be investigated to define useful services. Screening technical possibilities comprises the whole range of options for new services which is necessary to answer the question “What can we do and how?”. Technologies address the whole range for technology-pushed service innovations.

The complementary question to create successful service innovations is “What should we do?”. This question is answered by the second approach through investigating customer needs and requests. This will be considered as customer-pulled service innovation. In addition there is a third approach revealing innovation needs that is business itself. Business-invented service innovations are serving the needs of entities inside the company and strive for increasing efficiency, cutting costs, etc.

Combining the two questions results in the challenge “What will we do?” and integrates the complete range of potential approaches for services science research being expected by customers and/or business and at the same time feasible through the application of technology. Figure 1 depicts these three key drivers as pillars in the big picture of service innovation.

 

 

Analyzing multidisciplinary models, methods, and tools for adoption in the field of services science research leads to the development of a comprehensive framework to foster service innovation. This provides the fundament of Services Science Research for Service Excellence.

Figure 2 depicts the constituents of an IT-enabled service. First of all, a service is a process, combining multiple activities to create a defined output – valuable for the clients. Second, employees, applications, or a combination of both are needed to execute the process. Therefore, employees and applications are considered as resources, necessary to provide the service. A specialty of services is a co-creation scenario with the clients. Whereas products are more or less completely manufactured prior to delivery, service delivery is intimately connected with service production integrating the client into the production and delivery process.

 

 

As depicted in Figure 2 a common service understanding comprises three dimensions that have to be considered: one output-oriented, one process-oriented, and one potential-oriented. The output-oriented dimension represents the overall target of the service and is therefore used to describe which value is created for which recipient (“what?”, “for whom?”). The process-oriented dimension focuses on the useful combination of internal and external resources to generate the desired output in an efficient manner (“how?”). The potential-oriented dimension characterizes the provided resources as the base for service production and delivery (“by which means?”).

The three dimensions of IT-enabled services are closely connected to the three perspectives in figure 1. The business perspective analyzes the process dimension of a service. In order to get a better understanding of the customer we have to focus on the output-oriented dimension which describes the value created by the service. The technology perspective takes a closer look at the resources respectively the potential dimension of a service to investigate which technologies can be used to deliver a service to the customer.