Service Management: Evolution and Moving Forward

This chapter describes the evolution of service management (SM) from focusing on services as a category of market offerings (as distinct from physical products) to a perspective on value creation. This evolution of SM can be described in three broad periods. The first was when services were understood as unproductive or additions to physical products. Management models from manufacturing and marketing of goods were used, but service organizations could not be managed by using models from manufacturing. This sparked the second period, in which research on service-based concepts and models was grounded in the service encounter, service quality, and customer relations in service organizations. However, no widely accepted view or definition of service and SM was developed during this time. About 20 years ago, in the third period, a new view on service was developed, and this view is still moving SM forward. Service (singular) was understood as a perspective of value creation. The Service-Dominant Logic was born and has developed into a systemic view of understanding service businesses. Recently, a somewhat different view—a practice-theory approach to SM—has been suggested, which still focuses on value creation through service.