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 "hotels" | View all papers
The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents
Journal of Marketing, 1990
Mary Jo Bitner
From the article: "The service encounter frequently is the service from the customer's point of view. Using the critical incident method, the authors collected 700 incidents from customers of airlines, hotels, and restaurants. The incidents were categorized to isolate the particular events and related behaviors of contact employees that cause customers to distinguish very satisfactory service encounters from very dissatisfactory ones. Key implications for managers and researchers are highlighted."

Examples: Airlines, Hotels, Restaurants, Life Insurance

Compare with:
SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality
Service Behaviors that Lead to Satisfied Customers
Want to Perfect your Company's Service? Use Behavioral Science
An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Non Verbal Communication on Service Evaluation
The Profitable Art of Service Recovery
Harvard Business Review, 1990
Christopher Hart
From the article: "Mistakes are a critical part of every service. Hard as they try, even the best service companies can't prevent the occasional late flight, burned steak, or missed delivery. The fact is, in services, often performed in the customer's presence, errors are inevitable. But dissatisfied customers are not. While companies may not be able to prevent all problems, they can learn to recover from them. A good recovery can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. It can, in fact create more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place."

Examples: Club Med, Maine Savings Bank, Marriott Hotel, British Airways, Domino's Pizza, Stew Leonards, US Air, DFW Airport, Sheraton Hotel, Smith & Hawken, First Union National Bank, US Secret Service, Sonesta Hotel, Montgomery Ward, McDonald's, Federal Express

Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customers and Employees
Journal of Marketing, 1992
Mary Jo Bitner
From the article: "A typology of service organizations is presented and a conceptual framework is advanced for exploring the impact of physical surroundings on the behaviors of both customers and employees. The ability of the physical surroundings to faciliate achievement of organizational as well as marketing goals is explored. Literature from diverse disciplines provides theoretical grounding for the framework, which services as a base for focused propositions. By examining the multiple strategic roles that physical surroundings can exert in service organizations, the author highlights key managerial and research implications."

Examples: Hotels, Restaurants, Professional Offices, Banks, Retail Stores, Hospitals, Ticketron, Federal Express, Supermarket, 7-11, Cinnamon Roll Bakeries, Airports, Club Med, Benihana, Scandinavian Airline Systems, Fast Food Chain, Supermarkets, Department Stores, ATMs, Miniature Golf

Compare with:
Clueing in Customers
An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Non Verbal Communication on Service Evaluation
European Journal of Marketing, 2000
Mark Gabbott
From the article: "Considers the role of non-verbal communication in consumers' evaluation of service encounters. Non-verbal communication has been extensively studies in the psychology and psychotherapy disciplines and has been shown to have a central effect on participants' perceptions of an event. As services are essentially interpersonal interactions it follows that non-verbal communication will play a major part in service evaluation. Uses an experimental methodology based on video scenarios to demonstrate the effect of this type of communication on consumers. The results indicate significant differences in respondents' reactions to the scenarios according to the non-verbal behavior of the service provider."

Example: Hotels

Compare with:
SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality
Want to Perfect your Company's Service? Use Behavioral Science
The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents
Service Behaviors that Lead to Satisfied Customers
Want to Perfect your Company's Service? Use Behavioral Science
Harvard Business Review, 2001
Richard Chase
From the article: "Behavioral science offers new insights into better service management. In this article, the authors translate findings from behavioral-science research into five operating principles: 1) finish strong; 2) get the bad experiences out of the way early; 3) segment the pleasure, combine the pain; 4) build commitment through choice; and 5) give people rituals and stick to them. Ultimately, only one thing really matters in a service 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."

Examples: Cruise Lines, Airline Baggage Pickup, Malaysian Airlines, Health Care, Business Consulting, Phone Menus, Trade Shows, Walt Disney, Banks, Hotels, Copier Repair, McKinsey Consulting

Compare with:
Service Behaviors that Lead to Satisfied Customers
The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents
An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Non Verbal Communication on Service Evaluation
Will You Survive the Services Revolution?
Harvard Business Review, 2004
Uday Karmarkar
From the article: "The loss of service jobs, which currently account for over 80% of private sector employment in the United States, is not merely an American phenomenon. The fact is that service sector jobs in all developed countries are at risk. We are in the middle of a fundamental change, which is that services are being industrialized. Three factors in particular are combining with outsourcing and offshoring to drive that transformation: The first is increasing global competition. The second is automation. The third is self-service. As these forces combine to sweep across the service sector, executives of all stripes must start thinking about arming and defending themselves, just as their manufacturing cousins did a generation ago."

Examples: Travel Agent, Diagnostic Imaging, Edmunds.com, Wells Fargo Bank, Dell, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Concierge Services, Financial Services, Hotels, NTT DoCoMo, Thompson Publishing, IndyMac Bank

Compare with:
The Industrialization of Service
The Four Service Marketing Myths
Journal of Service Research, 2004
Stephen Vargo
From the article: "Marketing was originally built on a goods-centered, manufacturing-based model of economic exchange developed during the Industrial Revolution. Since its beginning, marketing has been broadening its perspective to include the exchange of more than manufactured goods. The sub-discipline of service marketing has emerged to address much of this broadened perspective, but it is built on the same goods and manufacturing-based model. The influence of this model is evident in the prototypical characteristics that have been identified as distinguishing services from goods — intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability. The authors argue that these characteristics (a) do not distinguish services from goods, (b) only have meaning from a manufacturing perspective, and (c) imply inappropriate normative strategies. They suggest that advances made by service scholars can provide a foundation for a more service-dominant view of all exchange from which more appropriate normative strategies can be developed for all of marketing."

Examples: hospitals, Dell, airlines, banks, hotels, theaters, Cannondale, Acumin, Land Rover, Levis, Harley Davidson

Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation
California Management Review, 2008
Mary Jo Bitner

Examples: Hotels, Yellow Transportation, ARAMARK Parks & Resorts, Marie Stopes International Global Partnership, San Francisco Giants

Compare with:
Blueprinting the Service Company: Managing the Service Processes Efficiently
How to Design a Service
Designing product/service systems: A methodological exploration