Information technology and the discipline of service science have changed the way we think about, develop and deliver service and services. This book will introduce a novel concept, service mining, to address several research areas from the viewpoints of technology, model-building, management, and application. 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. The goals of this book are to develop the concept of service mining and identify the possible applications of it. The contribution is to furnish a roadmap of service mining to researchers, managers, and marketers in service sectors.