Service excellence models: a critical discussion and comparison
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose As customer expectations expand and as product offerings hardly differ from each other, service excellence has gained in importance as a means of enhancing customer loyalty. The aim of this paper is to focus on expanding and extending what companies can do to achieve service excellence by comparing and evaluating three popular approaches to excellence. Design/methodology/approach The authors compare three of the most commonly used excellence models, Johnston's conceptualisation of service excellence, the EFQM Model as a representative of national quality award models and the Kano model, and their respective applicability and specific perspective on service excellence. The evaluation is based on theoretical arguments, criteria and on a qualitative expert study. Findings Combining the selected models provides a comprehensive approach to service excellence. Since all models are compatible and complementary with each other, the analysis provides an enhanced understanding of service excellence and also explains in which context it is most feasible to apply any of the respective approaches. Furthermore, the requirement for a genuine service excellence model becomes evident. Research limitations/implications By focusing on three specific excellence models, others such as the Canadian Quality Award and the Australian Quality Award are not considered. Furthermore, a study across industries could reveal how service excellence is achieved in each industry to then transfer this knowledge into other sectors. Practical implications By comparing the selected models, benefits of merging the individual approaches are identified. The resulting combined perspectives offered by the individual models present a more detailed insight into what management can undertake to ensure service excellence. Originality/value As no prior research has examined the relationship between the selected excellence models and their implications for providing service excellence, this present research offers an innovative approach and thus yields new insights into the conceptualisation of service excellence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it