The aim of this paper is to define service excellence and its components in the case of a public organisation in the insurance field that strives to achieve excellent service. The findings are intended to support the organisation in making strategic decisions on prioritising different fields of action.

The approach was to define indicators for excellent service and relevant key performance indicators for customer service to be able to make recommendations. The analysis was conducted using current literature in the field of service excellence and primary data collected from employee interviews. The theoretical framework is primarily based on Johnston's model (2004) and the pyramid of service excellence (European Committee for Standardization, 2015).

The results highlight 8 indicators that are critical to the achievement of service excellence. The service promise and an effective complaints management system serve as the foundation, while the individual service delivered by skilled and satisfied staff distinguish basic from excellent service. Digitalisation functions as an enabler, especially in the area of responsiveness, another crucial factor related to customer service. The element of surprise is hard to sustain in the long run and is therefore not a predictable factor, but going the extra mile for customers can still result in delight. To systematically pursue the achievement of service excellence in the long term, it is necessary to measure and monitor the progress of these elements with the appropriate key performance indicators. Therefore, the following 7 customer service key performance indicators were created as part of this thesis: completion rate within target resolution time, contacts per resolution, share of transferred emails, forwarded calls, share of unresolved complaints, staff hours invested in competence building and instant feedback website.