Managing Service Operations

Course Number 2120

Professor Ananth Raman
Fall, 29 Sessions
Exam

Managing Service Operations (MSO) focuses on how firms can deliver excellent service while achieving business success. This involves a deep understanding of customers, competitors, and the firm's internal mechanisms.

Career Focus

Managing Service Operations investigates how to design firms to achieve sustainable service excellence. Service excellence is sustained when value is created for owners, employees, and customers. This course is appropriate for those planning to work in service firms and for those working in companies that analyze or provide support to service businesses, such as consulting or venture capital firms. The course has a strong emphasis on consumer services, with only modest attention to business services.

Educational Objectives

The course explores how managers can influence customers, employees, and service designs to create and capture value. Through exposure to a wide range of industries (e.g., financial services, government, health care, hospitality, and retail) students will gain tangible lessons from each class that they can use in a broader context.

Course Content and Organization

Current practice reveals a lack of widespread understanding of effective service management. Consider, for example, that in virtually every industry customer service costs increase while customer satisfaction decreases. This course takes the position that there is enormous potential to improve services and has as a goal to equip students with the concepts and tools to do so.

MSO consists of five modules.

1. Service Operations Fundamentals: This module introduces students to the "basics" of service management and covers topics like yield management, after-sales service, and queuing. A basic understanding of these topics is desirable for all service managers.


2. The Customer Operating Role: In many services, customers have an operating role. That is, customers perform tasks that traditionally were performed by employees. This module explores this aspect of service operations and the attendant challenges it imposes on service operations. Hence, understanding and learning how to influence customer operating behavior is central to service operations and a central theme in this module.


3. Designing Sustainable Service Models: This module addresses the challenge of designing sustainable service models: services that simultaneously produce value for customers, employees, and owners. Principles of effective service design will be developed through a series of successful and unsuccessful case examples. As a result of this module, students will learn how to analyze existing services, assess whether new services "fit" with existing services, and how to design new services.


4. Translating Service Models to Service Operations: Performance management systems play a crucial role in determining operational performance. This module will focus on the design of measurement, incentive, and reporting systems for delivering service excellence by examining multiple service contexts where performance management systems were used effectively or ineffectively.


5. Improvement with Customer Operators: Continuous improvement plays a vital role in all operations. This module takes the view that firms can improve their service operations by exploiting systematically the vast and increasing amount of data - data on transactions, customers, stores, competitors - at their disposal. While the sheer volume of data has increased, its managerial influence has remained relatively constant. This module lays out a structure for how to approach data analysis, starting with how to ask the right questions, how to perform relevant analysis, how to interpret results, and perhaps most importantly, how to communicate insights to non-statistical audiences.

Grades will be based on class participation, two exercises (one team-based), and a final exam.