New research makes the case for customizing service

November 22, 2010

Shakespeare famously argued that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players.” Similarly, new research from SFU Business uses the metaphor of service experiences as theoretical performances, to explain how employees (the actors) follow or write the scripts for customers (the audience) to consume.

The future of service industries lies in customization – at least for those companies catering to the increasingly fickle tastes of today’s consumers, who want more choices and more options than ever before.

Mass customization, which combines cost-effective processes with the flexibility of individual customization, is often associated with physical products – such as cars, machinery or household appliances.

However, it is also garnering wider acceptance in the area of services – ranging from restaurants and hotels to health care providers and emergency responders.

To this end, new research insights from business professors Ian McCarthy and Leyland Pitt of Simon Fraser University and Pierre Berthon of Bentley College show how service organizations can employ mass customization strategies.

Entitled “Service customization through dramaturgy”, their chapter is part of the recently published book “Mass Customization: Engineering and Managing Global Operations.”

“As an activity, services are highly customizable,” said McCarthy, the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Operations Management at SFU Business. “We argue that, in terms of making this happen, when you are designing a service, you have a performance – the service providers are the actors, and customers are the audience.”

This kind of customization is something that happens with increasing regularity at hotels, as well as restaurants and even some cafes.

He points to one popular Canadian upmarket restaurant chain where servers interact uniquely with customers based on several standardized prompts – from making friendly banter, to paying compliment to a menu selection.

According to McCarthy, this kind of approach is especially important when training staff. “Different hotel and restaurant chains want to put on different levels of performance in terms of customization.”

Paramedics are a less obvious but rather classic example of a service provider relying on mass customization to achieve the best possible outcome. “They follow rules – but they have to problem solve and improvise on the spot to meet different needs and situations,” he said.

Not all service organizations will necessarily embrace mass customization, says McCarthy.

“You can walk into several fast food retailers, where their workers are trained to follow scripts that involve up-selling. There are call centres where you feel like you’re talking to a robot. In these cases, it’s about replication of a service. And that’s fine for organizations that want to compete in a factory-like setting.”

However, said McCarthy, the long-term trend is towards the uptake of customization in service design.

“As service organizations represent a growing segment of the overall business sector, and are becoming increasingly globalized, we believe that it is important to identify and examine the operational configurations necessary for delivering different types of service customization.”

Read the chapter from McCarthy, Pitt and Berthon here:
http://business.sfu.ca/files/PDF/research/McCarthy_Papers/MC_Chapter_McCarthy_et_al_final.pdf

The book can be read in its entirety at:
http://www.springer.com/engineering/production+eng/book/978-1-84996-488-3