TOWARDS A SERVICE EVALUATION CULTURE A contemporary issue for service design

Evaluation practice in the service sector is still a fragmented and controversial topic; despite emerging issues of the contemporary historical moment require monitoring the use of resources in a radical efficiency perspective. According to this statement the paper explores evaluation studies coming from social sciences in order to understand what does it mean to evaluate and how evaluation can actually support decision-making processes. What emerges is that evaluation requires a design process and a well-defined strategy to be trustable and sharable and to produce results useful for satisfying the evaluation objectives. The focus will then shift to service evaluation. In the field of services, evaluation does not answer yet to what asserted by evaluation studies and an evaluation culture is missing. The paper thus proposes a service evaluation framework with the purpose of answering to evaluation design specific requirements and reflecting on how service design could contribute in designing an evaluation strategy.