Business Service Management White Paper - Volume 2
Page 18 of 46
A unified service classification scheme?
Looking across these different (traditional) classifications
schemes as well as others, Cook et al.
(1999) attempt to provide a unified framework that captures all the important purposes, and
dimensions of the classification schemes found in the literature. They found that,
in general, a
classification scheme is designed to achieve one or more of the following purposes:
Definitional (e.g. Judd, 1964)
Services marketing (e.g. Lovelock, 1983; Shostack, 1977)
Identify and quantify services (e.g. Kellogg & Chase, 1995)
Service system efficiency (e.g. Mersha, 1990)
Strategy (e.g. Murphy & Enis, 1986; Shostack, 1977)
Productivity
Goods/services
classification
Organizational design
Managerial issues (e.g. Schmenner, 1986)
Formal
marketing function
Predict consumer behaviour
Service design (e.g. Kellogg & Chase, 1995; Shostack, 1987; Wemmerlöv, 1990)
Service quality (e.g. Grove & Fisk, 1983)
Consumerism
Analytic models of service (e.g. Karmarkar & Pitbladdo, 1995; Rust & Metters, 1996)
In
addition, they provide a schematic representation of the various categorizing variables found in the
literature (Figure 8). The number in the parenthesis beside each service dimension indicates its rank
where a dimension’s rank is based on the frequency with which it has
appeared in the sample of
literature on which the study was based (e.g., customer contact, which is ranked number one,
received
the most attention in the literature).
