Service Innovation based on the Integrated Knowledge of Customers and Internal Business Processes

Abstract

As a labor force of service industry has grown significantly and a portion of service industry in GDP has increased, services are increasingly important to the economy. Companies are more and more reliant on service-based business. As customers purchase not a singular product but all-inclusive services together with a product, it is not too much to say that all kinds of industries converge into the service industry ultimately. With this shift to focusing on services, researchers are growing more and more interested in service science that is the study of service systems aimed at improving them. The development of SSME has been provided with a particular strong force by advancement of computing and information and communication technology (ICT). And the role of customer as co-producer of service values has been highlighted. Customers are both the inputs to the service process and the source of innovation and differentiation of services. Service quality should be addressed from the customer viewpoints. Service innovation should be considered over the entire service life cycle with customers’ collaboration. However, companies do not fully use customer knowledge including customer information and feedback from customers in service innovation processes. Although they have customers’ evaluation information such as customer complaints (Voice of Customers: VOC) and customer satisfaction index (CSI) survey results, the evaluation results are not used for integrated management of service value chain processes. As the boundaries of business have been collapsed and business convergence has been issued, companies have to find new growth factors for their survivals. It is important to invest originative ideas for pioneering. As the originality or the newness is the important prerequisite to companies, the importance of first-mover advantage in service domains has been increased. But, the researches about visioning future promising services such as service roadmap a...