Content area
Full Text
QUIS 12: Expanding the Definition of Service Excellence and Quality in Service
Edited by Rohit Verma
1 Introduction
Companies have embraced customer experience as a way to obtain sustainable competitive advantages ([35] Shaw and Ivens, 2005), leading some authors to claim that customer experience will be the next competitive battleground ([32] Pine and Gilmore, 1998). [23] Meyer and Schwager (2007) define customer experience as the internal and subjective response customers have to any contact (direct or indirect) with a company. Customer experience is a holistic concept that encompasses every aspect of a company's offering ([44] Zomerdijk and Voss, 2009).
Service design research acknowledges the importance of experience when designing a new service ([21] Mager, 2009; [24] Moritz, 2005). Service design is a multidisciplinary field that involves marketing, human resources, operations, organizational structure, and technology disciplines ([27] Ostrom et al. , 2010). Following this holistic approach, service design orchestrates service elements such as the physical environment, people (customers and employees), and service delivery process to help customers co-create their desired experiences.
However, the scarcity of research about customer experiences ([41] Verhoef et al. , 2009; [38] Stuart and Tax, 2004; [29] Patrício et al. , 2008; [33] Roth and Menor, 2003; [17] Hill et al. , 2002) is mirrored in the methods used by service design researchers to collect and depict experience data. Service design applies interdisciplinary methods and tools from several backgrounds ([24] Moritz, 2005), but they seem focused on single elements of customer experience, rather than on the complete landscape of experience factors. For example, consider personas which are defined as "a documented set of archetypal people who are involved with a product or service" ([34] Saffer, 2010). Personas provide information about the customer, or a specific kind of customer, who will use the service. Another example is use cases that are focused on the intended functionality of a service ([34] Saffer, 2010). Also, another stream of service design research has focused on the service delivery process ([37] Smith et al. , 2007), addressing aspects such as technology infusion ([15] Froehle and Roth, 2004; [4] Bitner et al. , 2000), customer contact intensity ([8] Chase, 1981), and internal process design to support experience ([42] Verma et al. , 1999; [43] Voss et al....