Servitization and Customer Experience

Services dominate most developed economies, representing approximately 75% of the labor force and gross domestic product. Yet traditionally, many management, marketing, and engineering courses have focused on the manufacturing sector of the economy. This course is designed especially to deepen students’ knowledge about service industries and how to address the distinct challenges of innovating, managing, and delivering quality service to customers.

An important theme in the course is that traditional manufacturing organizations are transitioning to solution providers. A process known as servitization. You will gain an understanding of the associated servitization business models and challenges organizations face in implementing them. By analyzing service processes through hands-on tools such as the Gaps model, or service blueprinting, you will learn that services’ design and delivery depend on close coordination among marketing, operations management, information technology, and human resources.

A second theme of the course focuses on customers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality and the resultant levels of customer satisfaction. We will pay specific attention to the role of frontline employees and technology (e.g., self-service technologies, service robots) in service interactions. You will learn that services are inherently people‐oriented and that the effective delivery of services is impossible without a good strategy for managing human resources. Through analyzing real-life operational service data using multivariate statistical techniques, you will gain experience in engineering the optimal service system. This system balances operational performance (e.g., speed, quality), with innovation and customer satisfaction, e.g., through matching specific employees with specific markets, service jobs, or customers.

The aims of the course are:

The course objective is to introduce students to the concept of servitization, the importance of creating unique customer experiences, and the challenges related to service innovation management.

Learning objectives:

• To differentiate between services and physical goods and understand how these differences translate into strategic directions.
• To (re)design service processes, using Service Blueprinting.
• To understand the ramifications of service failure and the benefits of service recovery strategies.
• To integrate technology in service delivery (e.g., self-service, service robots, artificial intelligence), both from an employee and a customer point-of-view.
• To understand how the measurement and analysis of customers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality are critical to the engineering and marketing of services.
• How to utilize frontline employees and customers for innovation purposes, i.e., as a resource to improve services in the short- and long-run.
• To model and design servitized sustainable business models.
• To use multivariate statistical techniques, to systematically analyze, understand, and (re)design a service system to balance operational performance, innovation, and customer satisfaction.
• To asses how stakeholder management can be used for implementing servitized business models.
• To identify the required organisational capabilities for servitized business models to facilitate the coordination of different information, financial resources, and material flows.

You must meet one of the following collections of requirements

• Collection 1
• Completed Final examination Bsc program
• Collection 2
• Completed Pre-Master

• Selection of academic articles Part is recommended, Part is mandatory