Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value

The service process design landscape is rapidly evolving, with technology-enabled innovations allowing the service provider to create a more personalized service experience and customers to take a more active role in the service process.

Designing Service Processes to Unlock Value was written to help you understand the opportunities (and challenges) for value creation in this dynamic environment. You will learn about approaches for designing all types of service processes, as well as the unique challenges of designing knowledge-intensive services. And because service performance outcomes are dependent on the knowledge, skills, and abilities—that is, capabilities of both service providers and customers, the book concludes with strategies for unlocking these capabilities to further boost value co-creation.

This edition was being revised when artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) was being embedded in more and more service processes ranging from knowledge-intensive professional services to transactional services we engage with every day.

Much like the COVID-19 global pandemic, AI and other developing technologies such as robots, extended reality, digital twins, Internet of Things, and other smart technologies, will continue to have profound impacts on how services are designed, delivered, and experienced by service providers and customers, as well as the communities and world in which we live.

This edition includes new and updated examples of technology-enabled innovations that provide unprecedented flexibility in service process design and continue to transform how service providers and customers co-produce services. At the same time, you will see how these and other service innovations can have important—and sometimes surprising—impacts on the benefit and cost trade-offs and synergies that determine value co-creation.

Joy M. Field is an associate professor of operations management in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. She received an MBA, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in operations management from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, and Strategic Management Journal. She serves as an associate editor for Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Service Management, and Journal of Service Research. She is a deputy editor for Service Science and associate editor for Decision Sciences and Journal of Service Management.