Managing Service Quality within the Knowledge-Based Economy: Opportunities and Challenges

The knowledge-based economy, along with the impact of information society technologies, presents the service organizations and their customers with many potential opportunities as well as challenges. Therefore, this study explores how the knowledge-based economy could influence the quality management of service organizations. The study reveals that the actors within the service sector have vast new opportunities in terms of communication and value co-creation, but in the same time, the requirements regarding the quality of provided services trigger various problems for managers. The originality and value of this study consist of identifying logical connections between changes in the society, changes in the services, and changes in the service quality management. The findings of this study reveal that service quality management, as an integral part of the management of services, became more important within the knowledge-based economy as compared to the traditional (industrial) economy. Service quality management is knowledge-driven, it relies on people’s continuous development, network-intense collaboration (sharing ideas and knowledge), and value co-creation to attain sustainable competitive advantage. The study was carried out by combining a wide variety of sources, such as research papers, conceptual papers and literature reviews. Our conclusion justifies the effort invested in improving service quality management and also has relevance for service organizations’ managers in a very sensitive area like the service quality management.