Purpose The motivation and aim of this paper is to collect and systematically present useful information from any published material that describes real life cases of Quality Management Systems (QMSs) and quality assurance techniques that have been applied in Greek service companies. The diffusion of the aforementioned valuable knowledge will help directly service companies in Greece to benefit and upgrade their operation, while at the same time, indirectly, the whole Greek public sector will be enhanced, which actually constitutes a necessity for Greece nowadays. Design/methodology/approach In order to realize our goal we have carried out an extensive research of the literature, thus managing to identify publications that concern various sectors of services, i.e. banking, education, health and social sector, hospitality, insurance, logistics, mobile telephony, public sector, SMEs providing services, sports and transport. Findings Our review has revealed that Greek companies offering services, despite their small size, seem to follow progressively the trends of international and competitive markets, implementing various QMSs. At the same time, it shows that the majority of companies ask for external quality consultants to help them with the proper design and implementation of the selected standards. On the other hand, this review reveals that only few publications presented exhaustively the methodology that was followed by service companies in order to design and/or apply a QMS. Originality/value Whenever a Greek company providing services wishes to develop and implement a QMS or another quality assurance technique, it could rely on the knowledge of the presented surveys and, potentially, follow the solutions, procedures and best practices of similar companies, which have accomplished the same task in the past.
