Microsoft Word Volume 2 Service and Service Quality Final docx

Services economy
 
growth through innovation
Queensland University
of Technology

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Business Service Management White Paper - Volume 2 
Page 4 of 46 
Executive Summary
Managing service quality is of primary importance for organizations that are increasingly service 
oriented, and offering a growing range of services to external and internal customers. Managing 
service quality requires the capacity to measure service quality, concomitantly requiring explicit 
conceptions of ‘service’ and ‘service quality’. This white-paper explores three keys areas of service 
and service marketing literature: service definition and conceptualisation, service classifications, and 
service quality models, and make the following observations and proposals. 
Proposal 1 
While conceptualisation of services has its root in product marketing literature and hence began as a 
“non-product” market offering, focusing on characteristics such as Intangibility, Heterogeneity, 
Inseparability, and Perishability, contemporary definitions are focusing more on the interactive nature 
of services, and stressing more the interactive processes and capabilities of the service provider on one 
hand, and the experience, benefits, and notion of value-in-use to the service consumers on the other 
hand. We propose that these differing conceptions be abstracted into a single, related view of service 
as follows:
“A service is a (market) offering by one party (the provider) to create value for another party 
(customer) through interaction in a co-production process (with the consumer)”. 
Proposal 2 
There are complex and diverse perspectives on the purposes of, domains of, types of, and participants 
of services. This complexity will increase as boundaries between products and services become 
blurred, the role of ICT in providing and using services increases, the alternative channels and 
combinations of channels by which services are delivered multiply, and as more organisations 
(including those in traditionally product-based industries) rely on new and innovative services for 
revenue and profit growth. This complexity poses a dilemma: on one hand, the need for a generic 
service quality model that enables comparison and parsimonious management of quality of different 
services continues to increase as organisations strive to provide more and better services; on the other 
hand, the complexity also means that such a generic model may not be possible. If we strive for an 
abstraction that is independent of the complexities identified, we will end up with a model that is too 
simplistic. However, if we strive for a detailed measurement model that could cater to all the possible 
variations outlined, the model will be too complex for it to be pragmatically useful.
To mitigate the complexity identified, we propose that our scope of research into service quality be 
restricted to the consumer experience of business-to-consumer service encounters, over potentially 
multiple channels, with the purpose of seeking insights into how we can improve upon consumers’ 
satisfaction.

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Business Service Management White Paper - Volume 2 
Page 5 of 46