Chairman Lee Sang-jin of Korea Standards Association.

The 4th Service Week took place at Lotte Hotel at Lotte Hotel and Grand InterContinental Hotel in Seoul from July 2 to July 5 under the theme “Good Service, Better Quality.” The Service Week events were hosted by the Korean Standards Association (KSA).

A forum on future innovation of the service industry held on July 2, the first of the opening day session, was held under the theme “Tasks and Outlooks for Enhancing Korea’s Service Quality Levels.” The forum was divided into three sessions on medical care, tourism and the shared economy. Experts shared the view that the use of technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolutions lies at the heart of improving future quality levels.

In this regard, the government has been working on how to pursue shared growth and revamp regulatory regimes with the advent of the new service industries since last year. The public and private sectors need to cooperate and have checks and balances.

The KSA plans to systemize conventional big data, IoT, blockchain, and machine-learning educational programs so that high-quality manpower can be supplied to companies. The association plans to offer regulatory regimes and standardization guidelines on the new technology environment in cooperation with the government.

To this end, it has embarked on the development of the KS-eSQI, a model for objectively measuring quality levels of new services. The 4th Service Week served as opportunities for the private sector, the government and people to have in-depth discussions on the pending issues of the service industries.

With the fast advancement of technologies, it is important to have social capabilities to coordinate interests of stakeholders, so the KSA plans to strengthen its roles of serving as platforms to max out each circle’s capabilities. The Service Week, which made its debut in 2016, takes place in the first week of July each year to stress the importance of the service industry.

A group photo for the winners of the 2019 Korea Service Grand Prix held on July 5 at Grand Inter-Continental Hotel in Seoul. (Photos: KSA)

Korea Standards Association Presents 2019 Korea Service Grand Prix

This year’s Korea Service Grand Prix was presented on July 5 at the Grand Inter-Continental Hotel in Seoul as happened every year with the award presented during the first week of July. Shinhan Life Insurance and GS Retail were entered into the Hall of Fame, the top awards in this year’s service awards, with 13 other firms including Lotte E&C winning the annual awards and the four firms including Shinhan Bank getting the Best Practice Awards.

Also joining the awardee list were 16 companies, including Samsung Card and the Daegu Infrastructure Corp. grabbing the 2019 Service Design Competition Awards.

The service design awards, presented for the 6th consecutive year, are designed to highlight excellent design cases for benchmarking among service business firms, while they go thru the evaluations for ratings.

A group of top leaders of the service firms won the meritorious awards in recognition of their dedication to the firm,s including President Kim Jong-hwan of Hotel Lotte and President Hur Yon-soo of GS Retail.

KSA improved the screening standard of Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in the U.S. to help the Korean service standard evaluation system to be better than the global standard so that it can be used to improve the domestic service industry.

The new model to evaluate the service industry put together by KSA is to bring all factors related with management, from CEOs to operational control, under the customer-oriented system so that they can be evaluated scientifically.

The Korea Service Grand Prix welcomed its 20th year in 2019, in which 142 companies participated in 375 award presentations, making a great contribution to the development of the service industry and improving the quality of life in Korea.