Claudia Lehmann explores service productivity from the providers, customer and operations perspective in the German airport industry using a solid empirical foundation. Available service productivity concepts, methods, measurements and their ability to overcome the emphasized problems are discussed, suggesting ways on how to deal with them. The insights of this book deliver considerable value for both management and academia.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Exploring Services Science (IESS) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 2010. Based on the previous edition and the momentum in this emerging and exciting field, IESS 2011 offered academics, researchers, and practitioners from various disciplines an exploratory platform to communicate and share their results and experiences. The 17 full and 2 short papers accepted for IESS were selected from 47 submissions and cover the whole life cycle of service development (including service innovation, service design, service composition, and service sustainability) as well as the application of services in information technology, businesses, and public administration.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Exploring Service Science (IESS), held in Porto, Portugal, in February 2015. Service science constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to systematic innovation in service systems, integrating managerial, social, legal, and engineering aspects to address the theoretical and practical challenges of the service industry and its economy. The 27 full papers accepted for IESS were selected from 69 submissions. The papers consider the topics service innovation, service exploration, service design, IT-based service engineering, and service sustainability.

It was my pleasure to work with Calvin on his Doctoral Study at Walden University from 2014 to 2018. According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science (2012), the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have a universal healthcare system. Citizens in this country spend twice the amount of money on healthcare costs, while the quality of services is only ranked 31st in the world by the World Health Organization. By using system’s theory, Calvin identified those factors that are directly and inversely related to healthcare costs. If these factors go up, healthcare costs go up; if they go down, healthcare costs go down. In Calvin’s study, he documents and discusses that $667 billion dollars is wasted because we don’t manage these factors efficiently. He then identifies factors that are inversely related to healthcare costs. If they go up, healthcare costs go down; if they go down, healthcare costs go up. This represents a total of $391 billion. To correct this problem, we need to improve efficiencies to reduce costs and we need to reduce inefficiencies to lower costs with evidence-based practices that work (see Figure 3 on page 98). If only half of these issues were successfully worked on, hospital costs could be reduced by $500 billion. We would have enough funding to make certain that every person in the United States could have fully funded healthcare insurance (Gossett, et al., 2019). This is a book that is well-worth reading. -Kenneth D. Gossett, Ph.D. May 6, 2022

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Exploring Services Science, IESS 2017, held in Rome, Italy, in May 2017. The 33 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. IESS 2017 covered major research and development areas related to Service Science foundations, service engineering and management, service innovation, service orientation of processes, applications in service sectors and ICT support for services. The presented papers were organized in topical sections named: theoretical contributions: literature analysis and conceptual models; service systems analysis and design; service organizations case studies and practices; and sustainability: service ecosystems, environment control and transportation.

Diving into the evolution of Customer Experience this text offers an insightful exploration of the paradigm shift from customer service to Customer Experience (CX) within the Caribbean context. Unveiling the dynamics of CX's influence on satisfaction, loyalty, and business profitability, this book delves into strategic planning, employee development, data-driven decisions, and emerging technological trends. Scholars and practitioners within customer service, services marketing, customer experience management and customer relationship marketing in the retail hospitality and tourism, financial, health care and education sectors will find this a valuable resource on CX's transformative power in this region and beyond.

Service science constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to systematic innovation in service systems, integrating managerial, social, legal, and engineering aspects to address the theoretical and practical challenges of the services industry and its economy. This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Exploring Services Science (IESS), held in Porto, Portugal, in February 2013. This year, the conference theme was Enhancing Service System Fundamentals and Experiences, chosen to address the current need to explore enhanced methods, approaches, and techniques for a more sustainable and comprehensive economy and society. The 19 full and 9 short papers accepted for IESS were selected from 78 submissions and presented ideas and results related to innovation, services discovery, services engineering, and services management, as well as the application of services in information technology, business, healthcare, and transportation.

Provides an updated view of knowledge management strategies of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) by focusing on how those firms manage innovation in their value chains and at the territorial level. Offers an original analysis of key processes of KIBS, specializing in design, professional firms and information technology.

The discipline of Services Science, introduced by IBM in 2002, has emerged and matured in a true transdisciplinary atmosphere. Encompassing disciplines not only in management and engineering, it also draws from disciplines such as social and cog- tive sciences, law, ethics, economics etc. to address the theoretical and practical - pects of the challenging services industry and its economy. Services Science leverages methods, results and knowledge stemming from these disciplines towards the development of its own concepts, methods, techniques and approaches thus creating the basis for true trans-disciplinary gatherings and the p- duction of transdisciplinary results. Services Science is building a concrete framework for transdisciplinary purposes. IESS1. 0 – the First International Conference on Exploring Services Science – was the first international conference held in Europe in this domain. The conference took place during February 17–19, 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the conf- ence was to build upon the growing community to further study and understand this emerging discipline. Academics, researchers and practitioners of all disciplines were invited to contribute their results and approaches to Services Science in a tra- disciplinary setting. In order to achieve the best possible mix of disciplines and their representation, the conference call for papers was structured around transdisciplinary service research topics including service innovation, service exploration, service - sign, service engineering, and service sustainability, and around more disciplinary oriented service contexts such as: sectors and services, IT and services, foundations of services science, and governance and management.

The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices – from performance management to public-private partnership – in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this context and how it should be realized. The predominance of a rather narrow definition of the term – very often focused on the ratio of inputs to outputs – has tended to polarise opinion either for or against efficiency agenda. Yet public service efficiency, more broadly conceived, is an inescapable fact of the public manager’s task environment; indeed in the past, the notion of efficiency was central to the emergence of the field of public administration. This book will recover public service efficiency from the relatively narrow terms of recent debates by examining theories and evidence relating to technical, allocative, distributive and dynamic efficiencies. In exploring the relationship between efficiency and democracy, this book will move current debates in public administration forward by reflecting on the trade-offs between the different dimensions of efficiency that public organizations confront.