Traditional service marketing and service science attempted to help companies understand what customers think and how companies dealt with problems. However, a holistic framework and viewpoint to explore services differently is needed. Service mining provides a different perspective into the services industry. Professionals and practitioners also need various mindsets to investigate and analyze the evidence from services. According to the concept of service science, certain areas are involved such as economics, management, computer science, and engineering. This book provides a novel concept to combine the areas of social science and computer science in services. Service mining is a holistic concept covering a service’s lifecycle from design, experience, recover to retain. Traditionally, the value of mining is to discover unknown and potential patterns from big data. Service mining focuses on the amount of data generated from the value co-creation process and features of services. The goal of service mining is to analyze any step in the service’s lifecycle and help enterprises reexamine each one. Companies can also utilize appropriate marketing or management methods to adjust biases and revise the errors of services.
Service mining is defined as ‘a systematical process including service discovery, service experience, service recovery and service retention to discover unique patterns and exceptional values within the existing service pool’. The goal of service mining is similar to data mining, text mining or web mining. All aim to ‘detect something new’ from the base being mined. Service mining targets the service pool. What distinguishes service mining from data or text mining is the concept service itself. Data is generally considered factual; text, though more nuanced in that words carry connotations, has a primary denotative quality which conveys meaning that text miners and the consumers of the mined text agree upon. Service, however, is trickier. It is a process of establishing a value proposition; and the value it represents is the joint creation of the provider and the customer, each of which offers a different perception in constructing the value proposition. Moreover, in the concept of service mining, the mining target is not only the traditional categories of services but also IT-based services. Under the big umbrella of service science, service mining is considered to be a branch of it. … Service Mining