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The National Health Service (NHS) has many different kinds of professionals and managers working underneath its large umbrella: non‐clinical managers administer the work of health‐care professionals, who in turn are concerned with the management of patients’ treatments. Delivery of health‐care services involves the managers and professionals working together to achieve a service that is good for, and acceptable to, patients. A change in the philosophy of the NHS is indicated by the growing acceptance, by both managers and professionals, of the necessity to elicit the views of patients (i.e. the expectations and perceptions of service users) and to incorporate these views into the planning and implementation of services. Discusses one such attempt to elicit the perceptions of service users, and reports on the preliminary findings of a patient‐centred audit which has been undertaken in Southend Community Care Services NHS Trust. Discusses the effects that the audit has had on the chiropody services in Southend, for both non‐clinical managers and health‐care professionals, in order to highlight the usefulness of the approach.

There are distinct differences between professional services and other services which affect the way consumers make purchase decisions about them. This paper discusses the differences using the consumer decision process as a framework. Strategy implications for the professional service provider are presented, and specific suggestions are offered to improve the efficiency of the exchange — thereby benefiting both the buyer and the service provider.

Investigates the role of the professional in a firm offering professional services aiming to answer the questions of: what marketing activities the professional might use; what proportion of his/her time should be divided into what areas; and how marketing sales and costs might be calculated. Looks at current practices in this area, and attempts to find conceptual frameworks to guide professional service firms in the marketplace.

Little attention has been given in the literature to operating decisions in professional service organisations. A better understanding of the power relationships within a professional service organisation provides insight into the way these decisions are made. A model is proposed which categorises professional service organisations according to the relative power of the major stakeholders: professionals within the organisation; clients; and top management. The major factors which affect each of these are discussed.

Presents a review of the literature on the methods and approaches for identifying and satisfying customer requirements for professional service organizations and thereby facilitating a process of continuous improvement. Finds that putting in place a process of continuous and company‐wide improvement in professional service organizations is not easy owing to intangible outputs, high buyer interactions and a lack of heterogeneity. Points out that the entire client interaction process requires careful management control and the provision of professional services which meet the needs and requirements of clients, requires well developed recruitment, training, internal communications and appropriate reward and recognition systems.

The purpose of the chapter is to contribute to the discussion as to whether some sort of regulation of professional accountants is warranted, by analysing whether professional qualification of accountants affects the provision of accounting services.

A survey method is used. From a sample of 96 accountants providing accounting services in Slovenia, we estimate the structural equation model and measure competences, knowledge, service mix, customer loyalty and litigation risk.

We find that professional qualification is positively associated with competences. Competences, in turn, are positively associated with knowledge and wider service product mix, but not with customer loyalty and litigation risk.

The respondents are practicing accountants. Their self-evaluation of their knowledge should be treated with caution in terms of the absolute values of assessed knowledge as they are inevitably subjective. For other variables, more objective measures are used.

In the absence of accounting profession regulation, the quality of financial reporting may be particularly vulnerable in micro companies. Although answering the question of whether provision of accounting services should be subject to regulation is not straight-forward, the results of our study provide some guidance for regulatory decision making.

We identify three key areas of change in the context of professional services. First, is the increasing demographic diversity and growing income inequality within professions; second, is the emergence of neo-liberal ideologies that challenge traditional professional norms; third, is the emergence of management consulting as a distinct occupational group with professional aspirations. We argue that these trends have produced an environment in which the delivery of professional business services has become disembedded from its institutional context of professionalism. We speculate about the possibility of the re-emergence of professionalism as a distinct logic of authority and control for professional service organizations.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges of pricing quantity surveying (QS) professional services to enhance the understanding of practitioners in developing strategies for the determination of fees for their services.

The paper adopts the quantitative approach by administering 150 survey questionnaires QS professionals out of which 79 questionnaires were retrieved for analysis using the mean, standard deviation, standard error and the Chi-Square test.

The study identified the challenges that continue to hamper the successful pricing of QS services as the inability to respond to changing contractual arrangements; lack of appropriate response to emerging services; slow response to changes in information and communication technology.

This paper focused on QS professionals. Hence, a future study to encompass other professionals in the built environment will be novel.

The findings of this paper have the potential to motivate QS firms to develop solutions that address the challenges identified to improve the efficiency of their service delivery to clients. The paper also has the practical importance of opening up new frontiers of research that focus on pricing of professional services in the built environment in general.

The paper contributes to the awareness and understanding of QS professionals about the challenges that continue to hamper effective pricing of their services.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how the intermediation of an online agent in the relationship between prospective clients and professional service providers affects individual purchasing processes and decisions, and satisfaction with the professional service provider once the commercial transaction is concluded.

Drawing on the integrated trust-technology acceptance model, modified to include two additional variables to take into account of the specificities of the context investigated – users’ perceived reduction of information asymmetry and satisfaction with the professional service provider – a research framework is developed and tested with a research design combining a decision tree procedure with structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis. Participants are 188 users of an Italian website which incorporates an online agent that refers notaries to prospective clients.

Decisions to purchase professional services brokered by online agents depend upon trust in the agent, and users’ perceptions of the agent’s ability to reduce information asymmetry, as well as its perceived usefulness. Online agents for professional services can be effective as well as efficient: users who bought the service from an agent-referred notary had higher levels of satisfaction with their professional service provider than users who purchased the service from a different notary.

This is the first empirical effort to investigate the effects of online agents in the specific context of professional service purchasing. The uniqueness of the research context permitted identification of a new type of online agent, the “double-sided online referral agent”.

The purpose of this paper is to apply concepts from organizational and social identity theories to theoretically consider different ways that professional service providers conceptualize their roles and deliver their knowledge.

The paper is a conceptual discussion to advance the understanding of professional service delivery, within the realm of service‐quality research.

The field has yet to provide a clear understanding of what professional service delivery actually looks like. The paper offers propositions examining the process by which professionals identify with membership in their profession and firms that in turn, influence their expert‐based self‐concepts, the images they form of their clients as recipients of their knowledge, and ways they create the service exchange. The paper also considers the impact of professional and organizational identification on the types of clientele professionals may develop.

The paper adds depth to the understanding of the complex process of expert‐based service delivery. The ideas presented in this paper have implications for research in service‐quality, specifically in understanding how and why professionals approach their client‐interactions.

The ideas presented in this paper would be useful to professional service firms interested in understanding the role their firm's identity plays in ways its professionals conduct their work and the types of clientele they wish to attract.

The paper contributes to the service quality literature through conceptualizing professional service delivery. It represents a step in acknowledging the role of professional delivery in influencing service outcomes and in developing the theoretical rationale as to why different approaches exist.