Want to perfect your company's service? Use behavioral science.

It may seem like the topic of service management has been exhausted. Legions of scholars and practitioners have applied queuing theory to bank lines, measured response times to the millisecond, and created cults around "delighting the customer." But practitioners haven't carefully considered the underlying psychology of service encounters--the feelings that customers experience during these encounters, feelings often so subtle they probably couldn't be put into words. Fortunately, behavioral science offers new insights into better service management. In this article, the authors translate findings from behavioral-science research into five operating principles. First, finish strong: the ending is far more important than the beginning of an encounter because it's what remains in the customer's memory. Second, get the bad experiences out of the way early: in a series of events, people prefer to have undesirable events come first and to have desirable events come last. Third, segment the pleasure, combine the pain: since experiences seem longer when they are broken into segments, it's best to combine all the boring or unpleasant steps of a process into one. Fourth, build commitment through choice: people are happier when they believe they have some control over a process, particularly an uncomfortable one. And fifth, give people rituals and stick to them: most service--encounter designers don't realize just how ritualistic people are. Ultimately, only one thing really matters in a service a encounter--the customer's perception of what occurred. This article will help you engineer your service encounters to enhance your customers' experiences during the process as well as their recollections of the process after it is completed.

Beefing up operations in service firms.

Many articles exhort service firm managers to empower workers and first-line supervisors, exploit technology, focus on the customer, and, above all, provide outstanding service. This article proposes a framework to help you evaluate your company's competitive standing in each of these areas. It discusses four types of companies on a continuum, from the company that is simply "available for service" to the firm that delivers world class service. The authors focus on operations, the function that controls the service encounter, and apply the manufacturing strategy paradigm to services as a means of implementing change.

Motivating the client/employee system as a service production strategy.

Productivity improvement in service organizations is of major concern to managers as one way of countering escalating costs. In service organizations in which the client/customer is directly involved in the production function, improved performance can be secured by viewing the client/customer as a "partial" employee. This proposition in turn leads to the suggestion that productivity gains can be realized for services by expanding conventional motivation concepts to include the client/customer.

Where does the customer fit in a service operation?

While management skills can improve service systems, a manager is better off if he or she first has a clear understanding of the operating characteristics that set one service system apart from another. This author offers one view of services, which, if followed, results in a "rational approach to the rationalization" of services. His view, quite simply, is that the less direct contact the customer has with the service system, the greater the potential of the system to operate at peak efficiency. And, conversely, where the direct customer contact is high, the less the potential that exists to achieve high levels of efficiency. This distinction between high- and low-contact systems provides a basis for classifying service production systems that can enable the manager to develop a more effective service operation.