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MSc BA track: Service Management

Examples of service organizations are banks, consulting firms, ‘temp. agencies,’ organizations as the Red Cross, universities, other schools, hospitals, professional networks, sport clubs, municipalities, etc. Organizations are more and more service organizations. In fact, two-thirds of all existing organizations are service organizations. Plus within any organization a substantial segment of internal activity is (in- and external) service delivery.

The primary production process of service settings is significantly different from that of industrial settings. Service delivery involves intangible experiences of customers, clients, patients, partners, members or citizens. It involves various forms of contact between service providers and those receivers. For a receiver, it involves always an experience (hence the popular term for our current economy as ‘experience-economy’). Managing the behaviors of employees in a service-type setting differs from managing in an industrial setting. The own logic of a service setting puts demands on management and other employees that differ from the demands within effective industrial organizing.

The number and variety of service organizations has risen dramatically in the past decades. However, most of our management knowledge is still based on industrial settings. Therefore, it is of paramount practical importance to study more closely the behaviors within service settings as well as the way they typically operate or could operate. Curiously, what we also find within industrial organizations is that they add service delivery into their ‘product’ range.

This Master of Service Management will focus equally on both the internal and external sides of service-type settings, in especially the private sector. It involves the offering of deep knowledge and insights from the managerial sub-disciplines Service Marketing, Strategy, HRM, ICT-services and Organizational-Psychology and -Sociology. Thus, we offer a broad Master of Business Administration that is focused, on a growing economic segment: Service(-sector) Organizing and Organizations.

The 3 specific courses dedicated to Service Management:

Labour Market prospects in Service Management

Masters’ students who have studied the track Service Management have a great variety of jobs available to them. Truly every service organization involved in improving their organization can benefit from people with an MSO-profile. Our MSO students can work in staff, line or consulting positions, both within the Netherlands and outside of the country (since our literature and orientation is also international). In addition to service provision to external clients, there are increasing numbers of specialized jobs, even within the public sectors or industrial firms, where those with a Service Management-specialization can thrive.

At the moment (Spring 2005) some Service Management-students are working on a Balance Scorecard study within Grolsch Logistics (Grolsch is our large, local yet internationalized beer firm with its new industrial (!) brewing facility). Another student did an internship/masterthesis on Complaint Management in the context of a recently merged and clientfriendly ‘Waterschap’ organization. ‘How to contribute to organizational-culture change containing better and more efficient internal and/or external service’ would be an overarching issue central to this track. In the end of the year you will have gained competencies in terms of organizational behavior and culture, leadership, change/improvement, necessary information systems; group and project management as well as service marketing: in the context of service priorities set by a given organizational strategy.

In short, wherever in this world organisational situations exist in which the external or internal clients must be served better, or more efficiently, Service Management specialists can serve. And, depending on your own other experiences, preferences and skills, you can quite broadly elect in which (service) organization you start your career. Careers made by our students with this specialisation will not be standard. That is for sure: with lots of unique opportunities! The service world is namely still expanding and improving itself, while most management practices are still geared for the industrial world. In this transformative period of our century, the business world is in need of those who have studied the unique features of service management and are willing and trained to apply them wherever they go.