Leading, managing and organizing for service excellence is a never-ending quest by organizations seeking to achieve outstanding performance in their fields. Benchmarking one's own approaches against other organizations' best practices and gaining insights from their experiences are powerful means for enhancing results. Papers presented at QUIS13 gave a comprehensive overview of scholarly and managerial advances in service excellence and management with contributions from around the world. During the event, well-known scholars and business executives shared their views, research and experiences gained in using innovation and leadership in the pursuit of service excellence. A wide range of themes were covered at QUIS13 such as service innovation and design, self-service technologies, service culture and leadership, complaint management and service recovery, service-infusion in manufacturing, service logic, human resource management, customer experience, service operations management, customer management, service science, transformative service and service quality put into action.

It is natural that new topics in research first appear at conferences and then reach journals. Consequently, we can do some trend-spotting from the submissions to QUIS13. The first observation is that there are some contexts that really are becoming popular; health care and manufacturing were really well represented among the submissions. The interest in manufacturing may not be too surprising given that the leading journals in service research are asking for more B2B studies. The conference was also held in Europe and European researchers have traditionally had a greater focus on manufacturing. Finally, we do see that many small and large manufacturing companies rely more and more on the service part of their business and want to know more on how to do that.