Aligning customer requirements and organizational constraints to service processes and strategies

Abstract

Purpose

Recognizing the fundamental role of quality as a means to differentiate service organizations, the purpose of this paper is to propose a strategic decision making framework for service organizations, which prioritizes performance improvement strategies that are rooted to customer requirements, organizational goals and constrained by organizational resources.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed framework is realized through the implementation of two stages and four distinct phases mirroring the combination of enhanced quality function deployment (first stage), and zero-one goal programming (second stage). It proposes the utilization of a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and the collection of data from multiple sources including customers, middle, and top management.

Findings

The application and validation of the proposed framework utilizes information from both customers and employees in the bank services sector. Overall, results from the specific study revealed that a combination of “reengineering” and “expansion” strategies was more appropriate corresponding to customer priorities, organizational goals and effective utilization of available resources.

Originality/value

The paper presents a novel two stage strategic framework for service organizations. It utilizes a balanced mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods in an effort to capture and delineate elusive customer requirements and design characteristics of services, allowing the assessment of different combinations of quality improvement strategies in response to management objectives.

Citation

Paltayian, G., Gotzamani, K.D., Georgiou, A.C. and Andronikidis, A. (2017), "Aligning customer requirements and organizational constraints to service processes and strategies", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 23 No. 5, pp. 1018-1042. https://doi.org/10.1108/BPMJ-10-2015-0140