Tools for Stakeholder Involvement in Facility Management Service Design

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the tools that Facility Management (FM) companies use to involve different stakeholders, and more precisely the ones on the demand side, in the FM service design process. Stakeholder involvement may  contribute to FM service innovations that are more in line with the stakeholder needs and expectations, and may thus result in increased customer satisfaction, better services and, at the very end, an increased competitive advantage for the organization.
Background: The background of this study lies in user involvement in service design in combination with empirical evidence and research from the FM field. The differentiation between clients, customers and end-users (Coenen et al. 2013) is taken as the ground to explore the peculiarities of stakeholder management within FM service design, and deepen the discussion on user involvement, which can be found in service design literature.
Methodology: To address the purpose of the study, this article uses a qualitative research design and combines an extensive literature review with semi-structured interviews and archival data from both primary and secondary sources.Results: This study provides an overview of the specific tools that are used to involve different stakeholders on the demand side in FM service design and innovation process. These tools have been categorized as: (1) direct methods that allow stakeholders (clients, customers and end-users) to actively participate in the FM service design and innovation; and (2) indirect methods that enable to passively involve stakeholders through ethnographic methods.
Practical implications: Practitioners could use the results of this study in the FM service design process to (1) identify which demand stakeholders they want to involve, i.e. client, customer, or end-user; (2) identify which type of involvement, i.e. as co-creator, resource or user, is called for in the specific design process; and (3) choose the design tools to support the FM service design process in each specific instance.
Originality/value: By taking the starting point in the literature on service design, user roles in service design and tools for service design, this paper contributes to FM literature by (1) first identifying the tools used by FM managers to involve users in FM service design processes and (2) by categorizing such tools in relation to the role that FM users have in the design process as well as FM service provision processes.