THE JOURNEY TO DATE: LESSONS FROM THE PAST SERVICES MANAGEMENT RESEARCH
Introduction Work has been conducted to differentiate between production of goods and delivery of services in order to define the nature of services. Development of services management stresses the need to include contributions form strategic management, operations management, marketing and organisation and human resources management.
A division of three types of service organisations has been determined in order to more closely understand the relationship of labour-intensity in service organisations. The role of front-line staff can affected by the degree of efficiency management has to recruit, train, support and reward these groups. A failure to do this well will contribute to delivery of poor service, high staff turnover, and therefore higher costs caused by constant recruitment and retraining.
Concepts and frameworks for understanding services management Service delivery can be classified as pure services (as in professional services) or as quasi-manufacturing services (in the case where there is a mix of intangible and physical features.) These attributes include: degree of contact and participation, length of time of encounter, extent of customisation, personal delivery vs. equipment delivery, degree of discretion or autonomy, front office vs. back room delivery and what is delivered vs. how it is delivered.
Three types of services are defined as: Professional services-- high contact, highly customised, great deal of time spent with customer, high ration of staff to customer, high level of autonomy of staff, hierarchy is a short chain of command. Mass services-- many transactions so minimum contact time, little customisation, predominately equipment based and product oriented, most value added in the back office, mainly non-professionals, closely defined division of labour. Service shops-- levels of customer contact, customisation and volumes of customers is positioned somewhere in between professional and mass service, mix of front and back office, people and equipment, product/process emphasis.
Service Strategy Michael Porter (1980, 1985) suggests general directions for competitive advantage for all firms based on a strategy of differentiation, low cost, or a focused strategy in niche markets. Mathur says that the product is evaluated on content and image and on service expertise; personalisation in the way the product is delivered. Another approach to service strategy is representing the model as a core service with a product surround; such as a hotel conceptualized as a core service of rooms with leisure activities representing the service surround.
Service Marketing There has been a shift from traditional transactional marketing to relationship marketing. Transactional focuses on single sales, product orientation, short time scales, limited customers commitment and service, moderate contact and quality only as a concern of production. New relationship marketing focuses on customer retention, product/service benefits, long time scales, high customer service and contact emphasis and quality is the overall concern. Markets came be segregated into supplier markets, employee markets, internal markets, and influencer and referral markets.