Significance of qualitative factors for a deeper understanding of service productivity

Analysing and optimising service productivity is a widely discussed task in service management. While directly measurable factors such as processing time or service turnover are frequently used in order to measure the productivity of services, underlying factors that are, in many cases, not (directly) measurable are not considered in-depth. However, these "qualitative" factors influence service productivity to a high degree. The idea behind the approach provided in this article is to open the former "black box" view on productivity (input-output) to a process efficiency-oriented perspective instead and to show which qualitative factors play a crucial role regarding service productivity.