This list represents a summary of the past forty years of service design literature. The citations were compiled from the Emergence conference at Carnegie Mellon University as well as the Designing for Services project in the UK, service design syllabi at CMU and independent research. I've included the abstracts and introductions to the papers and cross-referenced examples and concepts so that it's easy to follow the development of ideas such as "service blueprinting" across multiple papers.

Select any underlined term to filter the list, showing only papers that share that particular concept, example, author, journal or decade. If you'd like to help fill in the gaps by suggesting other canonical papers, e-mail the citations to service at howardesign.com. Thanks!

Filter: Papers that mention "Courtesy" | View all papers
Service Behaviors that Lead to Satisfied Customers
European Journal of Marketing, 2000
Kathryn Frazer Winsted
From the article: "Examines service provider behaviors that influence customer evaluation of service encounters. Develops a list of service provider behaviors relevant to customer evaluation of a service encounter. Examines performance of these behaviors in specific restaurant and medical transactions. Then examines the relationship between performance of each behavior and encounter satisfaction. Behaviors are grouped, using factor analysis from consumer surveys, into three dimensions: concern, civility, and congeniality. Each is defined using multiple behavioral measures. Measures include concepts not widely addressed in current services literature, including conversation, respect, genuineness, attitude and demeanor. These dimensions and constituent behaviors provide a framework for future research and service training and management."

Examples: Medical, Restaurant

Compare with:
The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents
SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality
Clueing in Customers
Want to Perfect your Company's Service? Use Behavioral Science
An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Non Verbal Communication on Service Evaluation