Strategic Service Institute: Implement Excellence Now While Innovating for Tomorrow

Is the customer experience at your company frictionless? Douglas Olsen, faculty director of the Strategic Service Institute, describes the omni-channel customer experience this way. A customer starts by searching online. Then she goes to the physical store where she looks at the product, but also continues her on her phone for other choices, merchants and …

ServiceFriday: Interesting Reads for Service and Beyond

Welcome to the CSL’s “ServiceFriday”. Each Friday we post three summaries from some of our favorite sources from research literature, news articles, blogs, and more. The posts are curated to cover topics that are interesting, relevant, and thought provoking in the realm of service, business, education, and beyond. If you like our blog and posts, …

ServiceFriday: Servitization Makes Dance Partners of Suppliers and Customers

Companies such as equipment providers have added services to their product offerings, responding to increased competition and changing customer expectations. In many cases, revenues realized from services now exceed revenues derived from products, and firms have new understanding of how to fulfill customers’ needs. The result is a new way of doing business where the …

ServiceFriday: Customer Involvement in the Service Design Process

What does your customer really need? Customers possess unique knowledge about usage necessary if companies are to design successful services. But customers also have what researchers call latent needs: requirements or issues that users themselves do not perceive or cannot articulate. To address this, many companies involve customers in co-creating innovations, but seldom do they …