To read this content please select one of the options below:

Transcendent service management

Richard Thomas Watson (Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA)
Leyland F. Pitt (Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada)

Journal of Service Management

ISSN: 1757-5818

Article publication date: 27 October 2021

Issue publication date: 3 January 2022

422

Abstract

Purpose

This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement. The intangibility spectrum is presented as a mental model for service managers to consider how to use cognitive computing to support augmenting their value proposition by moving across the spectrum.

Design/methodology/approach

Three frameworks are integrated: a five systems framework, a system's impact classification of types of cognitive computing and a tangibility spectrum.

Findings

Three examples illustrate the potential value of this integrative approach for service management.

Originality/value

This is the first integration of these frameworks, and two of them are the result of the first author's research.

Keywords

Citation

Watson, R.T. and Pitt, L.F. (2022), "Transcendent service management", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-08-2021-0332

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

Related articles