This book focuses on complex services, that is, services embodying the knowledge and capabilities of professionals, sought because of the client’s lack of knowledge or skills in specialized fields. This book is also concerned with the many organizations, such as hospitals and banks, that provide services requiring a mixture of professional and other services to produce the results that customers or clients need. Professionals, semi-professionals, and technical workers laboring in all spheres of human endeavor, from law to medicine, accounting to engineering, social work to architecture, who are involved or are interested in taking part in managing their businesses, small or large, will find this book an invaluable tool in achieving success. This third edition comes with an augmented value proposition: as you read and try to understand and experiment with the material, you are invited at various points to view video clips, lasting between 15 and 25 minutes, that will clarify, complement, illustrate, or go further than what you are reading.

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The quest for value drives customer behavior in the services marketplace. This book focuses on complex service processes, and is written for professionals, quasi-professionals, and technical workers laboring in all spheres, from law to medicine, and accounting to engineering. It draws its theory and examples from these professional services and many more, with hands-on end-of-chapter exercises on all topics. A framework is presented for understanding how a set of shared fundamental beliefs drives the best-in-class professional service organizations in their learning, which is the source of sustained competitive advantage. Products and processes can be imitated or copied, but learning faster than your competition cannot. Processes create the benefits customers want by delivering the service, or by making this delivery possible in one way or another. The notions, methods, and tools presented in this book present readers with a perspective on their work they most likely never envisaged, and which will lead to a marked improvement in their effectiveness.

The central focus of this book is how organizations deliver service and the operational decisions that managers face in managing resources and delivering service to their customers.

Service Design and Delivery provides a comprehensive overview of the increasingly important role played by the service industry. Focusing on the development of different processes employed by service organizations, the book emphasizes management of service in relation to products. It not only explores the complexity of this relationship, but also introduces strategies used in the design and management of service across various sectors, highlighting where tools, techniques and processes applicable to one sector may prove useful in another. The implementation methods introduced in the book also illustrate how and why companies can transform themselves into service organizations. While the book is primarily intended as a text for advanced-level courses in service design and delivery, it also contains theoretical and practical knowledge beneficial to both practitioners in the service sector and those in manufacturing contemplating moving towards service delivery.

Customer Service Delivery taps into business, marketing, and psychological research and practices to provide a wealth of knowledge about customer service. With contributions from some of the best-known industrial and organizational psychology experts in customer service, this book brings together in one comprehensive resource a review of the best practices in customer service delivery. Customer Service Delivery also provides a framework for customer service as a process and an outcome. The authors address a wide range of topics that are crucial to today’s competitive business environment: customer expectations, loyalty satisfaction, product versus service delivery, measurement, brand equity, regional and cultural differences, and organizational impact. Customer Service Delivery explores human resource staffing practices and service delivery by including proven selection strategies for hiring top quality service workers, an analysis of the personality correlates of service performance, and a comprehensive review of assessment instruments that predict customer service performance. In addition, this important resource contains strategies and tactics to improve and manage service delivery and offers illustrative case examples of how organizations have successfully improved and managed customer service.

This CIGRE green book begins by addressing the specification and provision of communication services in the context of operational applications for electrical power utilities, before subsequently providing guidelines on the deployment or transformation of networks to deliver these specific communication services. Lastly, it demonstrates how these networks and their services can be monitored, operated, and maintained to ensure that the requisite high level of service quality is consistently achieved.

Today’s customers demand service that isn’t just beyond the norm, but makes its mark in their minds and in their hearts. This updated edition of Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service provides readers with up-to-the-minute advice on how they can create world-class service both in their operations and through their people, whether they work with customers face-to-face, on the phone, or in e-space. Revamped with new examples, stories, and research, and featuring cartoons by John Bush, the book gives readers practical, proven ways to: * find and retain service-oriented people * get to know customers intimately * build a service vision * train and coach * create and maintain a service management process that aligns people, systems, and customers * involve and empower employees * recognize and reward good performance. Filled with examples from service standard-setters such as Fed-Ex, QVC, and others, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service shows how to create great service on a day-to-day, real-time, every-time basis.

Project management is seeing a shift away from managing by the triple constraint of time, cost and quality, towards ensuring the delivery of organisational value. The increased interest and take up in Project, Programme and Portfolio Offices (P3Os) demonstrates this.