Characteristics of good service interfaces

The design of service interfaces is critical to service management. Highly usable service interfaces are necessary for service orientation. The principles of agency, specialization, coordination, encapsulation and loose coupling are possible because of effective interfaces between service asset s and customer assets. Service interfaces are typically present at the point of utilization or service access points (Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4 The critical role of service interfaces

Service access points are associated with one or more channels of service. User interfaces include those provided for the customer’s employees and other agents, as well as process-to-process interfaces. The Service interfaces should meet the basic requirements of warranty:

• They should be easily located or ubiquitous enough, or simply embedded in the immediate environment or business context, as in the case of interfaces to software application s.
• They should be available in forms or media that allow choice and flexibility for user s. For example, there should be choice between staffed locations and automated self-service options, and choice between a browser and a mobile phone as access points.
• They should be available with enough capacity to avoid queuing or backlog when supporting concurrent use by many users. The presence of other users should not be noticeable (non-rival use).
• They should accommodate users with varying levels of skills, competencies, backgrounds and disabilities.
• The principle of ubiquity should be traded off with the need to keep interfaces low-profile and low-overhead to avoid undue stress on the customer’s use context or the business environment.
• They should be simple and reliable having only the function s required for users to tap the utility of the service (following the principle of Ockham’s Razor).
• Service interfaces should be self-reliant, requiring little or no intervention from service agents other than the dialogue necessary to carry out the service transaction.

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