[MUSIC] After the definition of heritage, and after the underlining of the importance of management in the arts, now we're facing a dilemma. Dilemma between curatorship and management in a cultural institution. To what extent is possible this co-existence? And above all, if it is possible to convey and transfer a value also to people that don't know anything about that. So curatorship and management lead us to think about the importance of the interaction. So interaction between the institution and the audience, the visitors. To better understand the interaction between consumer, visitor or audience and the cultural institution, itself, we need to refer to the literal context, the literal framework, of the service management. Service management, nothing else but provide the study of managing the interaction between the producer and the consumer. Not only of a good, but mainly of a service. Why services are important in a heritage management context? Because a service is the set of activity that a cultural institution can produce and provide in order to do mainly three things. First of all, to make the offer available. So we need to make the offer of this historical house available to the people, to the visitor. Then to stimulate the involvement. Service management allows the consumer, the visitor of a museum, the audience of a theater, to be involved in the context. And third, the service management facilitates the accessibility. So service provides all the tools necessary to make the work of art itself accessible. Of course, the activity and the goal of service management needs to be produced and provided in a coherent way, coherent way with many constraints. The main constraint of a cultural institution, or an institution that is providing and dealing with art and heritage, is first of all the complexity of the product, the work of art, itself. We will know with the example that I provided you in the course, starting from here in Villa Necchi, that the work of art is not easy for everybody. So there is a complexity around the very product that the cultural institution is dealing with. Then with the goal. A cultural institution has a specific goal to educate the consumer, to play an important role in the society, or to simply do fundraising for other purposes. So according with the goal of the cultural institution, the activity of the service management needs to be implemented. Then we need to take into consideration also the resources. Of course, if we don't have any kind of budget in an institution, we can provide all the best activity in order to engage the young consumer, the families. Dealing with the education of the people that don't know anything about the deployment of art that we are in a way selling. So if we have a budget constraint, of course, the service management needs to take into consideration that. And, finally, the last constraint, a goal that the service management needs to take into consideration, is the audience. Of course, we need to use different tools in order to engage and to relate with a different audience that, in a very precise moment of time, the cultural institution has inside it. Well, service management, management of services, but what are services? When we talk about a product that satisfies the need of the consumer, we typically refer it to either goods or services. We now focus on the main difference between services, and goods and product. And mainly we focus on the characteristics of service. The first characteristic is the intangibility, so the fact that we can not have a technical description of a service. We consider, for example, in a museum, the factor of art education, so as a location for students, for young children, and so on. This is a set of activities that the museum staff, so people, implement in order to make, in that case, more accessible and more involving the interaction with the work of art. But this is something that is completely intangible, this service, this activity. We can also make some example in the traditional non-artistic context, for example, the service of the transportation. We cannot describe in a tangible way what is the meaning of the transport. We need to be part of this interaction. We cannot describe the service without being part of it. And this is the second characteristic of the service, so the inseparability, the fact that we need to be part of this production of service. And, at the same time, production of the service and consumption of the service typically coexist in a precise moment in a set of time. We enter in a museum, we appreciate the work of art. But we are experiencing also the service that the museum is implementing in order to make their work of art accessible and involving for the visitors. Then we have a third characteristics, which is the variability. We have just said that in art education the important role is played by the people that is organizing the activity of art education. When we enter in a theater, when we listen to a concert, there is the conductor of the orchestra, the orchestra is explained. So those are a part of the production of the service. And, of course, if I listen to a concert conducted by a director, and in a different moment in the same theater, I listen to a same concert with another director, the appreciation and experience is changing. This service is changing. If we enter in a museum and we have a guided tour with a guide, and we enter in the same museum with another guide that may be saying the same things that the first one has said, we are experiencing a different level of service. So it's variable. It's variable because it's important and it's completely dependent upon the people that is involved in the production of the service. The fourth characteristic of the services are the perishability. We need to purchase the service and consume the service. We cannot stock and consume it afterwards. We enter into a cinema, we are looking, we are watching the movie. We cannot enter in a cinema, or enter in a concert, enter in a museum and consume the service later on. So these four elements of services that make some differences with the goods are quite important in order to understand a framework of the service management model. So intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability. After the definition of the service and the four characteristics, now we can focus on the conclusive part of this class, on the interaction. So we know that all the four characteristics have an impact on the interaction. There is a focus on the interaction between whom? Between the three actors that are playing a role in the service delivery. The provider of the service, so the institution, the company that is transferring, in the context of a cultural institution, transferring the value of the work of art, itself. The museum staff needs to transfer the importance of the art and the value of the art to the visitors. The theater needs to emphasize the value of the concept to the audience. So provider of the service. Who are the customers? The customers are the users of the service, people that are using the service in order to engage, be involved and to access the work of art, itself. And, finally, the third element that is interacting with the other two is the servicescape, the ambiance, the place where the service is delivered. Only with the interaction of these three actors, we can understand properly how the service management can be useful for the cultural institution. And how the cultural institution, through service management, can convey and transfer value to the final consumers. [MUSIC]
