Research On Service Strategy And Its Effectiveness In Professional Service Firms

As the globalization of the world economy and the rapid development of information technology, service has already become the leading industry in many developed country. Ever since the open and reform, service industry has been developing very fast in China. Professional service firms are an important part within the service industry, and they always developed more quickly than the traditional service firms, due to their advantages in professionalism and highly-educated employees, so professional service firms has now played a very important role in the whole economy in China.However, there are still some problems concerning the professional service firms in China: they don't really know what kind of service strategy would be an approapriate one for them, they seldom realized how to radically enhance the service quality, and they don't understand the mechanism of how service quality would influence the organizational performance. In order to answer these questions, this study aims to explore the characteristic dimentions of service strategy, as well as studying the relation between service strategy, service quality and organizational performance for professional service firms.Focused group interview has been used in the study as well as field survey. In investigating over 150 professional service firms in Zhejiang Province, Shanghai and Hubei Province and doing hypothesis testing with the data collected, we come up with the following conclusions:1. Service strategy in professional service firms has three characteristic dimension: task heterogeneity, dynamic integration and network interaction, and they are consistent with each other.2. Service strategy and its three dimensions positively influence the organizational performance in professional service firms.3. Service strategy and its three dimensions positively influence the service quality in professional service firms.4. Service quality and its three dimensions will positively influence the organizational performance in professional service firms.5. Service quality and its three dimensions compeletely intermediate the relationship between service strategy and organizational performance in professional service firms.6. Customer switching cost completely moderates the relationship between service quality and organizational performance.Based on the above conclusions, we suggest that professional service firms should develop an appropriate service strategy by determining its service strategy characteristic dimensions, and creat a service quality-oriented developing strategy. We also suggest that professional service firms should develop long-term customer relationship to increase organizational performance.