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!
From the article: "Quality of service is becoming an increasingly important differentiator between competing businesses in the retailing sector. In today's fiercely competitive marketplace, characterized by similarly priced, look-alike product offerings from a variety of retailing firms, clear winners will be the ones that provide excellent service quality. The paper describes the development and potential applications of a multiple-item instrument--called SERVQUAL--for measuring customer perceptions of service quality.
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Examples: Appliance Repair and Maintenance, Banks, Long-distance Telephone, Credit card
From the article: "In a previous article we presented SERVQUAL, a multiple-item scale for measuring service quality. In the present article, we discuss findings from a follow-up study in which we refined SERVQUAL and replicated it in five different customer samples. We also compare our findings with those of other researchers who have recently employed and evaluated SERVQUAL. On the basis of insights from this comparative discussion, we offer directions for future SERVQUAL research and applications."
Examples: Banks, Insurance, Long-distance Telephone
