David E. Bowen

Service Research Priorities in a Rapidly Changing Context

The context in which service is delivered and experienced has, in many respects, fundamentally changed. For instance, advances in technology, especially information technology, are leading to a proliferation of revolutionary services and changing how customers serve themselves before, during, and after purchase. To understand this changing landscape, the authors engaged in an international and interdisciplinary research effort to identify research priorities that have the potential to advance the service field and benefit customers, organizations, and society. The priority-setting process was informed by roundtable discussions with researchers affiliated with service research centers and networks located around the world and resulted in the following 12 service research priorities: stimulating service innovation, facilitating servitization, service infusion, and solutions, understanding organization and employee issues relevant to successful service, developing service networks and systems, leveraging service design, using big data to advance service, understanding value creation, enhancing the service experience, improving well-being through transformative service, measuring and optimizing service performance and impact, understanding service in a global context, and leveraging technology to advance service. For each priority, the authors identified important specific service topics and related research questions. Then, through an online survey, service researchers assessed the subtopics’ perceived importance and the service field’s extant knowledge about them. Although all the priorities and related topics were deemed important, the results show that topics related to transformative service and measuring and optimizing service performance are particularly important for advancing the service field along with big data, which had the largest gap between importance and current knowledge of the field. The authors present key challenges that should be addressed to move the field forward and conclude with a discussion of the need for additional interdisciplinary research.

“Lean” service: in defense of a production‐line approach

The desirability of transferring manufacturing logic and practices to service operations, strongly advocated by Levitt (1972; 1976) in two classic Harvard Business Review articles two decades ago, is now commonly challenged by both service researchers and practitioners. We defend a “production‐line approach to service” by arguing that services can “reindustrialize” by applying revised, progressive manufacturing technologies. We describe how services businesses such as Taco Bell, Southwest Airlines, and Shouldice Hospital have mastered what we call “lean” service ‐ the application of lean manufacturing principles to their own service operations. Overall, services tend to be innovation laggards, compared to manufacturing. Looking ahead, mass customization can be viewed as the convergence of service and manufacturing logic.

Total quality-oriented human resources management

Human resources holds the key to sustained quality improvement. Consequently, the HRM department can potentially play a critical role in an organizations TQM effort. Toactually do so, the HRM Department must: (1) Be a first-class, quality organization itself. It can accomplish this by applying TQM principles to its own internal operations; and (2) Design HRM practices for the entire organization that support a total quality-orientation. We describe how selection, training, reward systems, and so on, can be changed to help implement the TQM effort.

Human issues in service design

Abstract A heightened awareness of the fundamental behavioral science principles underlying human interactions can be translated directly into service design. Service encounter design can be approached with the same depth and rigor found in goods production. Service encounters can be designed to enhance the customer’s experience during the process and their recollection of the process after it is completed. This paper summarizes the key concepts from a panel discussion at the DSI National Meeting in Orlando in November 2000. The panel brought together a number of leading academic researchers to investigate current research questions relating to the human side of the design, development and deployment of new service technologies. Human issues from the customer and service provider vantage are illustrated and challenges to researchers for exploring this perspective are presented.

On the relationship between customer participation and satisfaction: two frameworks

Presents a programme of research from which a typology of service customers’ quality assurance behaviours was developed. The typology’s four behaviours define the broad range of service customers’ participation in service quality assurance. Examines the relationship between these behaviours and satisfaction. Presents an initial conceptualization of a service customer’s value chain constructed from these behaviours. Provides implications for services marketing, human resource management and service operations. In sum, the two conceptual frameworks presented in this research add to researchers’ and practitioners’ understanding of how customer participation in service delivery is related to satisfaction.

TOWARD A THEORY OF COMPARATIVE MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: AN IDIOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF THE BEST INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT PROJECT

Cross-cultural international management research is complex, costly, and frequently, nonrigorous. This idiographic study documents the evolution of a multinational, multicultural, interdisciplinary research consortium that sought to remedy this lack of rigor in a project investigating international human resource management practices. We identify key learning points derived from this project and conclude with the rudiments of a midrange theory of a comparative management research methodology.

Internal service recovery: Developing a new construct

This paper introduces the concept of “internal service recovery” defined as what the organisation does to make internal customers (front‐line employees), who have recovered external customers from service failure, feel less frustrated and more confident of their ability to deal with dissatisfied customers in the future. Internal service recovery often requires reducing employees’ feelings of low perceived control and helplessness. The results from an exploratory study of staff and managers in four branches of a UK bank shows that although the concept and practice of external service recovery is well understood, internal reovery is not. It is suggested that the “traditional” ingredients of external recovery (response, information, action and compensation) may be appropriate for the internal customer. It is also suggested that the passive, alienated employee behaviour associated with “learned helplessness” may need to be addressed through additional interventions. The purpose of the paper is to encourage both researchers and managers to examine how the effectiveness of internal service recovery affects external service recovery and the satisfaction of both employees and customers.

“Service logic”: achieving service system integration

Offers a “service logic model” as a managerial tool for tackling cross‐functional issues embedded in service systems. Uncovers and describes the logical components inherent in the three key service management functions – marketing, operations and human resources‐and suggests that the real management challenge, above and beyond cross‐functional co‐ordination, is integration of these components as the real drivers of service experience. A step‐by‐step template is offered for using service logic to achieve the fundamental grass roots integration required in the creation of outcomes valued for customers.

A Service Climate Synthesis and Future Research Agenda

Theory and research on service climate are synthesized, and an extensive agenda for future research is proposed. The service climate construct is first differentiated from conceptually related but distinct constructs, such as job satisfaction, service culture, and service orientation. Then a framework is presented based on prior research that displays service climate’s antecedents and consequences and the linkages among them. The synthesis draws heavily upon organizational behavior/human resource management (OB/HRM), but service climate has also received significant interdisciplinary attention. In particular, past work has integrated OB/HRM’s focus on the internal organization and marketing’s focus on the external world of the customer. The future research agenda includes further specification of the framework’s variables and linkages (e.g., the relative roles of individual and contextual attributes in creating service climate) as well as recommended research methods (e.g., profile analysis to assess interactions among multiple climates in a setting). Finally, the utility of the service climate framework for analyzing four key issues in service management is demonstrated: service infusion in manufacturing; the cocreation of value; sustainable competitive advantage; and the fostering of additional interdisciplinary research.

Revisiting customer participation in service encounters: does culture matter?

Abstract Service customers expend significant effort through a variety of behaviors, before, during, and after encounters, to increase the likelihood of satisfactory service experience or to salvage failing service encounters. Service customers’ satisfaction-seeking behaviors are both proactive and reactive in terms of both intent and execution. These behaviors include preparation, relationship building, information exchange, and intervention. This extension of the original research was presented by Youngdahl and Kellogg [Journal of Operations Management 15 (1997) 19]. It provides an examination of how robust the satisfaction-seeking behaviors are across cultures. The overall question is whether people in different cultures would use similar participative behaviors. We also examined whether or not culture is related to service customers’ effort and satisfaction. The counter-intuitive findings indicate that service customers’ satisfaction-seeking behaviors are not related to their cultural orientations. Additionally, culture is not related to effort or satisfaction level. The implication is that prescriptions derived from earlier research on these forms of service participation can be applied both across cultures and to any culturally diverse customer base.