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This article is about quality of service. It presents an overview and a summary model of current thinking on the topic. Many examples and illustrations are presented. Aspects of quality include: Quality of results and quality of process; search, experiential and credence quality; reality vs. perception; expectations vs. perceptions; customer satisfaction and technical quality. Various approaches and techniques are presented to improve performance quality-quality functions deployment, moving the line of visibility, blueprinting and failsafing-and conformance quality-guaranteeing, mystery shopping, recovering and measuring. q 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.Keywords: Aspects of quality; Service; Performance quality 0272-6963r98r$ -see front matter q 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.Ž. PII: S 0 2 7 2 -6 9 6 3 9 7 0 0 0 2 6 -0 ()

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Professional service (PS) exchanges are seldom narrowly bounded in time and space. This conceptual paper discusses prolonged PS sequences involving different professionals and different types of professionals. It is framed by the dual concepts of service episodes, representing the client's perspective and experience, and PS supply chains, that is, organized sequences of professional, clerical, and technical services explicitly set up to provide specific results, such as producing a financial product, designing a house, or replacing a hip. Four illustrative, empirically inspired situations are used to characterize episodes and supply chains. Each exemplar, two each from the health and social work sectors, is real and draws on publicly available data. The richness of the public information is a reflection of the fact that each is some form of failure or "disaster" (Altay and Ramirez, 2010). This dual conceptualization leads to a holistic perspective obtained by using the complex adaptive systems framework (Dooley and Van de ven, 1999, Levin, 1998) as a lens. The paper concludes with a discussion of the dynamics of such service systems and some proposals for a research agenda.