Quality of Services

Research Project, 2021 – 2022

Quality management has its roots in a manufacturing context, in which there are often a well-defined organisation of quality practitioners. However, Quality Management is nowadays applied in a variety of contexts including service sectors. This has led to developments of service quality as a somewhat separate concept. Quality of services is defined, developed and assessed differently than quality of products. As manufacturing firms start to offer both product and services, it is important both to understand more in-depth what service quality is in this context, and why it is often challenging for manufacturing firms to find well-functioning ways of working with service quality.

The focus is, for example, on how the quality function gets signals (so called activation triggers) that initiate improvement work and lead to development of capacity to absorb new knowledge and work on continuous improvement in response to e.g. customer feedback. Another example is capitalizing on many small experimentations in relatively short periods to discover what works as to create quality in the service ecosystem, e.g. in the context of sharing economy such as workspace sharing (coworking spaces).