Visionary Talk
The New Service I.E.: Engineering Customer Psychology into Service Encounter Design
Richard Chase
Justin Dart Professor of Operations Management
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California
Education: B.S., MBA, PhD, UCLA
Other university affiliations: Harvard, UCLA, IMD. University of Arizona
A service encounter is essentially an interaction between a customer and a server. The general approach to engineering this interaction is to focus on the informational and logistical needs of the customer and the activities required by the server to complete the process; the consumer behavior aspects, with the exception of the psychology of waiting have been virtually ignored. In this talk, I propose that we can build in cues and process steps that foster trust and enhance customer perceptions of control, choice, and the flow of the encounter itself. I will also discuss some on-going field studies of call centers, casinos, and health care organizations that my colleague, Sriram Dasu, and I have been undertaking. The long term goal of this effort is to create a new behavioral tool set for the industrial engineering of service work.
About Richard Chase
Dick Chase is a specialist in service operations management. He is the originator of the customer contact theory for service processes, with articles on the subject in Management Science and Operations Research. Two of his Harvard Business Review articles, "Where Does the Customer Fit in a Service Operation?" and "The Service Factory" (with Dave Garvin) have been cited as classics. His most recent HBR paper is "Want to Perfect Your Company' s Service Use Behavioral Science." He is coauthor with Bob Jacobs of Operations Management for Competitive Advantage, 11th edition. In 2006, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Production Management Society, and 2004, he was recognized as Scholar of the Year by the POM Division of the Academy of Management. He has recently consulted with Dell Computers and MGM Grand Hotels. He is on the Editorial Boards of several journals including MSOM and POMS.
His recent work with Sriram Dasu deals with engineering service encounters to include behavioral concepts.
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