Читать книгу A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services - Valerie Mathieu - Страница 51

The notion of co-production is an essential specificity of service management. It indicates that the service cannot be produced by the service provider alone but that it is co-produced with the client. Co-production not only signals the clients’ participation in the production of the service but also seals the necessity of their presence in the production of the service. The notion of co-production is linked to that of customer participation, which underlines the role that the customer must play in the process in order to obtain the service he or she wants. Servuction being a system, if we remove one element, the client in particular, the system will no longer function. This property of systems demonstrates the necessary presence of the client in the production of the service; without the client, there can be no service.

The customer is, thus, the central issue in service management. Not only must customers be satisfied as clients, but they must also be integrated as co-producers. The service provider must not only meet their expectations to satisfy them but also manage their participation to ensure that his or her service production system works as well as possible. The fourth part of this book returns to this point in depth.