AIM 2007 Conference
Education in Service Management
Alastair Nicholson
London Business School
How does service come to mind?
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Relationships: supplier-receiver
Shops
Answering machines
On-time delivery
Queues
Quality
Standards
Consistency with promises made
Cultural characteristics: USA, UK...
Regulation
Positioning service in education
 Business/management education
 Graduate/undergraduate
 Service courses
 Retailing courses
 Extension of logistics
A natural extension of manufacturing
operations management?
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Technical learning and tooling
Operational organisation - assembly
Work specification
Worker empowerment
Logistics and sales chains
Quality studies
Product life cycle values
Service experience management
Critical differences from
engineering education
 Difficult to define boundaries
 Less measurable - attributes, impressions
 Continuous management of interactions
 Much less specifiable
 Frameworks for analysis and consideration
- not formulæ for application
Parallels with concurrent engineering
Design
Concurrent
engineering
Manufacture
Service
management
Customer encounter
Make
Support
Scope and interaction of
service experience
Marketing
activities
Profitability
requirements
Regulatory
influence
Provider’s
operations
Architecture
of content
Impressions
/expectations
Customer
Employee
behaviour
Culture
experience
Other
customers
Essential assumptions for
service providers
 Service is an extension of ‘product’
 Need service concept to link marketing
and product technology
 Customers’ views are private
 Difficulties/disappointments not redeemed
by reference to specification
 Management is spontaneous
 Requirements are continuously variable
 Commercial value of service unknown
Approach to analysis
 Two parallel streams
Expectation
System
design
Customer experience
Service delivery system
Satisfaction
Cost
effectiveness
 Need to attract customers into service delivery system
 Need service delivery system to be fashioned to
reflect customers characteristics
i.e. ‘overlaps’ of impressions and realities critical
Concept of the Gap Model
Word of mouth
communications
Personal needs
Past experience
Expected service
Gap 5
Perceived service
Customer
Provider
Gap 1
Service delivery
Gap 3
Service quality
specifications
Gap 2
Management
perceptions of
customer expectations
Gap 4
External
communications
to customers
Elements of value experienced
in service encounters
Tangible
Intangible
Sell on these
‘Winners’
Explicit
‘Stated’
‘For you’
‘In brochure’
Delivered,
noticed
or ‘free’
Implicit
Unstated,
expected in
this context
Taken as
‘recommendation’
‘Qualifiers’
Retain on these
Factors available for organising
the service delivery system
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Participants
Information
Channelling
Technology
Architecture
Employee training
Décor
Points of contact
Lines of visibility
The context in which
service delivery systems operate
 The service system works within two trade-offs
Operational trade-off
Productivity
Customer service
Structural trade-off
Economies of
“standardisation”
Scope for change
Trade-offs illustrated in McDonalds
 Approach to productivity
 Validation of service concept QSCV
 Achievement of profitability by
the focus on throughput, not margin
Trade-offs illustrated in McDonalds
Trade-offs illustrated in McDonalds
Trade-offs illustrated in McDonalds