Blog Posts

While frontline employees are critical in creating positive service encounters, many customers are left to their own devices to fully extract the potential value from a service. Across industries such as education, personal finance management, and healthcare, customers are the primary agents in the production of value from services provided by companies.

In the classic 1978 HBR article, “Where does the customer fit in a service operation?” Richard Chase described the impact of high or low customer contact on the efficiency of the service production system.

Christian Grönroos, Hanken School of Economics Finland
Paul Viio, Hanken School of Economics Finland

The CSL’s member companies and board members are key partners and contributors to the Center.  We are happy to announce our most recent partnership with Philips Lighting, a leading provider of solutions and applications for both professional and consumer markets.  Philips has a stro

JOIN US ON A SERVICE EXPEDITION: Exploring Services from the Customer’s Point of View on January 15th, 2016!

In a recent blog post Analytics in Services: Actions versus Talk, we reviewed how companies are applying big data and analytics for both internal and external uses.

Just over 20 years since its first publication, the Service Profit Chain still appears in the presentations of leading companies at conferences around the world. Perhaps no other management model has survived the test of time and scrutiny by both business and academic leaders. Why?

A new study found that feelings of anger can overcome feelings of joy during the holiday season for those who seek shopping help through customer service.

In sum, companies should focus on a stable (and good) service performance level. Such performance level has the best outcomes for customers’ service assessment, and takes much less effort compared to constant adjustments needed in response to peaks and troughs in service performance.

Roger S. Ulrich, Texas A&M University
Leonard L. Berry, Texas A&M University
Xiaobo Quan, Center for Health Design
Janet Turner Parish, Texas A&M University

Leonard Berry, Texas A&M University
Stephen Connor, Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance
Brad Stuart, Advanced Care Innovation Strategies

Heiko Gebauer, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
Javier Reynoso, EGADE Business School, Monterrey Institute of Technology

Thank you for attending the 26th Annual Compete Through Service Symposium!

Please, don’t forget to submit your evaluations. We appreciate your feedback!

Bo Edvardsson, Karlstad University
Bård Tronvoll, Hedmark University College
Thorsten Gruber, The University of Manchester

My experience in customer service started in middle school, working for my grandparents at their retail gift shop.  Subsequently, a stint as a restaurant hostess and then a receptionist at a hair salon led me to managing a chain of espresso carts in Seattle where I enjoyed making coffee and talking with customers.

Over the last ten years I’ve become convinced that annual planning is the Achilles’ heel of customer experience. It is at the root of what inhibits the most efficient investment on priority investments in customer driven growth.

This is a recording of the CSL Best Practices Sharing Session discussing opportunities for the CSL Member companies to engage W.P. Carey MBA students through company sponsored MBA projects and summer internships. This session was recorded on 10/28/2015.

By all accounts, the use of big data and analytics is exploding. Ironically, relatively little hard analysis has been done to assess exactly how it is being applied, and to what effect – especially as it relates to services.

Your company may have made a major investment in Self Service Technologies (SSTs), but how well do you understand why your customers have used the technology you have created for them – or, more importantly, why they haven’t?

Lili Wenli Zou, University of Hong Kong
Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim, University of Hong Kong
Kimmy Wa Chan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University