I.Rationale and Objectives

Services have come to dominate our economy. Yet there remains some belief that service production and management is a simple adaptation of goods production and management. Unlike physical goods, services are co-produced with customers at a time, and in a place, of the customer’s choosing. And this co-production directly involves an organization’s front-line employees. As a result, services can not be inventoried and checked for quality assurance.

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a thorough understanding of the management and continuous improvement of service operations. This includes a thorough understanding of the service customer and experience, the service operation, service employees, service strategies, and new technology applications to service development and innovation.

The course begins by describing the service revolution and how services compete in the market place. We then study, in turn, the service customer, the service operation, the service employee and the service culture. In the second part of this semester, we will learn a systematic approach to developing a service quality, satisfaction and loyalty measurement system. We then explore service recovery practices and service guarantees using local case examples.