As business competition becomes tighter and more hostile, the focus on service management becomes a determining success factor. While excellence comprises many organizational factors, the human factor is what makes the difference and service quality translates into people management. This paper presents and analyzes the state of research on service management and human factors, allowing researchers to identify opportunities for future studies. A bibliometric study was carried out with data from the Web of Science database, enabling analyses of the most cited articles, keywords and authors, as well as the most productive institutions and countries. Customer satisfaction and service quality appear as relevant themes of researches on this matter, and the scientific gaps point toward customers' perceptions and frontline employees. The main scientific contribution of this paper is to assist new studies on people management in the service sector by identifying the latest trends, while also expanding the existing theory.