“Service logic”: achieving service system integration

Abstract

The service logic model proposed in this article delineates the organizing principles that govern a service system, and presents a way of fostering integration through design of the interactions that link the key processes of seamless service -customer, technical and employee logics. Our experiences and findings as participant-observers in US domestic and international corporate settings have led us to question the traditional functional or departmental approaches found in most organizations today. The article begins with a brief review of current organizing approaches, followed by an analysis of the components of a service logic. A mapping technique is then introduced as a way of surfacing and depicting connections between seemingly unrelated service activities. In closing, service logic propositions are offered as suggestions for future research.The recent shift to a buyer's market makes responsiveness to customer preferences a vital necessity for providers in all industries (Block, 1993). Service managers in particular are challenged to design service systems of the kind the customer desires: not mere assemblages of competing departments preoccupied with their own internal issues, but unified wholes focused on the customer's needs. Richard Normann, an early thinker in the field, said ten years ago that designers of effective service systems must ". . .think in terms of wholes and [in terms] of the integration of structure and process. . . ." (Normann, 1986). Yet a look at managerial behaviour in the service field today suggests that the application of this basic insight has been slow. The average manager still tries to improve service effectiveness by cultivating the one functional area -such as sales, operations or customer service -that is under his or her individual control.In part, this is because most service managers, though they are increasingly aware of the need for cross-functional integration, lack both the personal

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