In today’s Knowledge Economy, service has become one of the most prominent sectors of industry for any developed or developing economy. Despite its prominence, organizations still treat the management of the service function like that of manufacturing placing too much emphasis on process control to ensure quality and neglecting the uniqueness of the service product.

Service according to McColl is “the production of an essentially intangible benefit, either in its own right or as a significant element of a tangible product, which through some form of exchange satisfies a consumer’s need." Other definitions are “Service is a product that cannot be inventoried and is manufactured and consumed at the time of delivery.”

From the two definitions above, service has the following characteristics.

• Intangible: Service is intangible, it does not have a physical form in which we can touch, taste or smell. This implies that pure service has no tangible properties that can be assessed by customers prior to purchase or usage.
• Form: Service can be a whole product by itself such as management consultancy or tour guide or it can form part of a tangible product such as after sales warranty and restaurant service.
• Production (creation): Service is produce (created) at the points of interaction with the customer. The production (creation) of service and consumption of the service cannot be separated. The Production of service therefore involves people, the person(s) offering the service and the person(s) receiving it.
• Perish-ability: Services if not consumed at the point of creation is lost forever.

These characteristics of service give rise to two other unique characteristics.

• Service production is heterogeneous: The service product is variable. It is created to serve the needs of a customer at a defined time. It does not necessary follow a set process. The person offering the service will therefore produce various degree of service quality from customer to customer.
• Quality control: For manufactured products, its quality can be measured at various stages of production to ensure product compliance to design specification. Rejected products are discarded. This cannot be done for service products. Service is produce and consumed at the same point in time, similar to the Japanese Just-In-Time concept, quality control becomes extremely difficult as it cannot be corrected at the pointed of delivery.

So how do we then ensure that the quality of service is consistently maintained? Service due to its nature has a different set of quality control factors to manufactured goods. For manufactured goods, as long as the quality of the raw materials is scrutinized and the production process monitored diligently the end result will generally be within specification.

For the service product, because of its delivery just-in- time to customers, the quality control method used for production cannot be applied; service needs to have its own type of management control. To ensure successful service quality, the input to service which consist of mainly the human element, needs to have the right knowledge, skills and attitude. The service professional then needs to determine and understand what is the expected outcome (output) desired by the customer. It then becomes their duty to determine the best outcome for both the organization they represent and the customer. Only when this knowledge is known can they really start producing the service product. For the quality control system in a service product, much lies in the input (human element) and knowing the desired outcome (output).

A good example is a pianist playing in a concert. For the pianist to play in front of a paying audience, he or she needs to already have the knowledge, skills and attitude to play the song piece. He or she is aware of the desired outcome of the audience- need to delight their senses and emotion. Once the musician starts to play the piece (production) there is nothing to stop him or her from playing the wrong note but years and years of practice. Each wrong note will be detected by the audience and cannot be retracted back, irregardless of whether corrections are done thereafter.

The human element is key to the production of service products and its quality control. It is crucial that organizations understand the nature of their service product and the significance of the human element needed to ensure their service delivery is of quality.