ISSD Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

The service system concept embodies the essential claim that a service outcome is never the result of a single encounter between a service provider and service consumer. Instead, it emerges from the service system of back and front stage services that establish the context and satisfy the preconditions for the final service encounter to take place. There may be a ‘‘moment of truth’’ in which the quality of the service experience becomes apparent to the service consumer, but that quality was enabled or constrained to a greater or lesser extent by the entire service system.