Customer-focused service design for faster and more efficient services

Leading service providers continue to raise the performance bar by offering both greater responsiveness and lower costs. As a result, customers increasingly expect services to not only have shorter waiting times but also be more reasonably priced. The classic approach for designing service processes that decouples back-office from front-office operations is, however, not capable of responding to this dual challenge. In addition, while typical time-varying worker scheduling policies are common in the classic front-office design, implementing such policies often encounters various computational, managerial, and legal challenges. We propose instead that service designers adopt a constant staffing level policy that integrates the back-office and front-office operations. This new approach will result in services that are both faster and more efficient meanwhile relatively simple to implement in practice. Our new paradigm takes a systems perspective to design the service delivery process, creating new opportunities to share employee resources between front-office and back-office activities. Specifically, this approach permits some versatile, but relatively more expensive, employees to transition between time sensitive front-office activities and less time sensitive back-office activities as the situation dictates, while at the same time allocating significant portions of the work to dedicated and less expensive front-office and back-office employees.