Explains that, as global competition changes the expanding service sector, quality will play an increasingly pivotal role in both attracting and retaining service customers. Reveals that research into service quality has addressed two important dimensions: promoting quality through the design of...

Contends that service relationship marketing is all about promises: in order to keep a promise made to potential customers, service companies must ensure delivery of their promises. Discusses the making of promises: what to promise the consumer; why every service firm should strive to fulfill...

Services touch the lives of every person in every country every day. Today, intense global competition and increasing customer expectation have forced service firms to adopt various quality improvement approaches in retaining their competitive positions. Perhaps the most commonly used method for...

Argues that many blueprinting efforts are short‐term in focus and lead to the wrong response. Analyses examples in a range of industries, offering planning approaches and tactics for a successful serviceblueprint. Concludes that service blueprinting constitutes a major effort, therefore the...

Looks at unmet customer expectations in service delivery associated with service encounter problems. Problematic service encounters are compared to those which were problem free. Four services were evaluated by customers – legal consultation, hair stylist, film processing and retail store....

Six Sigma is now increasingly applied to a variety of processes ranging from manufacturing to service and variegated transactional processes. Six Sigma has been proved to be a rigorous pursuit of the reduction of process variation and defect rate in all critical business processes to achieve...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contingency factors affecting performance measurement in the service context. The paper aims to review the literature on performance measurement and synthesize it to a framework that creates a basis for analyzing measurement practices...

As businesses progress through their organizational lifecycle, many experience growing pains associated with increased volume, product line breadth, personnel, and the complexity associated with managing larger businesses. It is essential that the company have the ability to recognize these and...

Organizing new service development is an important topic for decision makers in service firms, since continuous innovation is expected to pay off. Although the literature on organizing new service development has grown rapidly over the last decade, the numerous publications are highly...

Purpose – Problem‐solving techniques for poorly structured problems have been the subject of recent academic research and popular press texts. The purpose of this paper is to explain the use of one of the Theory of Constraints thinking process (TP) tools — the Current Reality Tree (CRT)....