Track: Women in Industry and Academia

Abstract

The services employment figures in the world’s biggest economies demonstrate that the service sector has become the largest sector of the economy in most developed countries. As studies demonstrated that Lean has a positive effect on operational performance, service providers are adopting Lean, where Lean Service is the application of Lean to services. This research presents a case study with qualitative and quantitative methods approach, where a new online free service of knowledge transfer was created in co-creation with a customer focus-group. Two years of investigation were carried out, from April 2021 to April 2023, with a total of twenty-four online sessions, meaning fifty-one hours of knowledge transfer to a universe of 1118 customers. It became evident an empowerment in customer engagement, through co-creation and customer experience, where 89% of the customers attend more than one online session, and 31% more than five. The implementation process was surveyed through a series of interviews to obtain the voice of the customer and customer experience, and based on quantitative data, it became clear that the Lean Service helped to empower customer engagement.