Optimizing Service Encounters: A Co-productive, Experiential, and People-centric Approach

Most value creation in services takes place in service encounters — at the interfaces between customers, employees, and service organizations. However, managers are often unable to effectively optimize them, because their tools either fail to fully comprehend these interfaces, lying therefore on the fringes of the value creation process, or predate digital technologies. This monograph reviews the recent development of three levers for optimizing service encounters, which lie at the core of the service value creation process and are relevant in a digital world. These levers are: leveraging co-production to innovate in service design; delighting customers through experience design; and fostering employee engagement by putting people first. Given today’s abundant datasets and short feedback loops enabling scientific experimentation, we argue that the time is ripe for effectively optimizing service encounters.