Service Management

Service Management Report: Tutorial 1

This weeks tutorial was based on the research paper ‘Welcome to the world of services management’ written by Benjamin Schneider from the University of Maryland. In this paper Schneider focuses strongly on the HRM piece of service management, which was poorly covered before. Schneider emphasises that excellent service can pay rich dividends. High level of service gives organisations competitive advantages, higher customer satisfaction and loyal customers, which leads to a higher revenue and an increase in sales. Service management also faces businesses with variability in the service performance and the challenge of the elimination of variability in production through a certain extent of standardization. Moreover a good service recovery as a result of a service failure is an important part of an excellent service management. Schneider’s HRM focus discusses the working environment of employees and the implications of employee’s well being to their service performance. His hypothesis relates to high contact service businesses where strong service processes and interpersonal issues are present. He and his colleagues have shown that employee’s perception of their work environment strongly predict customer satisfaction. To guarantee a great service, managers have to see their employees as internal customer by ensuring recognition and rewards, internal supports from colleagues, adequate tools and equipment, and a strong sense of the importance of the highest service quality. Schneider claims that in order to be a service-quality business, a service manager have to ensure that HRM, OM and Marketing departments communicate well with each other, the service quality have to be measured, and everybody have to analyse how he/she can improve the service level. The mixed view of a strategic human resource management (SHRM) (an internal resource-based view) and an external view from the customer side is a key that leads to a successful...