Information Systems and Service Design (Fall 2011) UC Berkeley, School of Information

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 a series of back and front stage service encounters 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.