Models for Designing Excellent Service Through Co-creation Environment

Design approaches and methods that are currently widely used in practice target better customer satisfaction, without focusing on customer delight. Customer delight is essential to creating differentiated or better customer experiences. While “service excellence” as an organization’s capability to achieve customer delight has standards, such as CEN/TS 16880, a standard method for designing “excellent service” has not yet been developed. This paper attempts to provide a foundation for what excellent service is toward a new standardization of designing excellent service. The co-creation aspect in excellent service is emphasized in this paper to achieve continuous customer delight. A structured model of excellent service and the concept of a co-creation environment are described. “Engaged customers and employees” and an “ecosystem of data collection and utilization” are sub elements to enhance the effectiveness of a co-creation environment, which is modeled and elaborated as a leverage mechanism to differentiate excellent service from basic service.