Strategic segmentation in front-line services: matching customers,employees and human resource systems

This paper examines variation in the use of high involvement work practices in service and sales operations. I argue that the relationship between the customer and front-line service provider is a central feature that distinguishes production-level service activities from manufacturing. In particular, through strategic segmentation, firms are able to segment customers by their demand characteristics and to match the complexity and potential revenue stream of the customer to the skills of employees and the human resource system that shapes the customer–employee interface. Unlike manufacturing, where high involvement systems have emerged in a wide variety of product markets, therefore, service organizations are likely to use high involvement systems only to serve higher value-added customers because of the high costs of these systems and the labour-intensive nature of services. Data from a nationally random sample of 354 call centres in US telecommunications documents this pattern: from classic mass production approaches for back office workers and increasingly for front office residential service agents, to greater involvement for small business service providers and high involvement practices for middle-market service agents.     

服务产品多营销渠道下顾客渠道选择的量化分析

在全球服务经济迅速发展的背景下,以数字化为基础、互联网为纽带的新经济革命的到来,为服务产品如酒店客房的销售从传统的单一店面销售模式走向多营销渠道销售模式提供了强有力支持。本文首先对新技术环境下酒店客房销售模式进行了介绍,主要有实体门店销售、实体店官网销售、实体旅行社及在线旅行社四种模式,并针对不同年龄段顾客就这四种销售方式的选择趋势采用多属性决策方法进行了排序,且对排序结果作了解释。酒店在进行客房预订销售时,可以根据历史入住顾客年龄段分布情况,适时合理调整酒店的营销战略。     

酒店企业微博营销实证分析和策略建议

微博如大潮一般席卷全球,成为电子商务运作的利器。酒店企业可以通过微博与客人建立固定而长久的联系,尤其是那些创造了酒店大部分的销售额和利润的忠实客户,针对这些重要客户的不同需求,通过微博与其进行信息交换,能使酒店随时掌握他们的需求动态和想法,同时,利用已有的酒店宣传与销售网络,能使大客户随时掌握酒店新的服务项目和优惠政策,使酒店能对大客户的需要进行有针对性的促销。     

Pricing the cloud: a QoS-based auction approach

ABSTRACT

Cloud computing is an evolutionary technology that offers on-demand resources and elastic services through the Internet. Most providers adopt fixed-price mechanisms (e.g. pay-as-you-go). However, a few providers have recently employed auction-like approaches to price cloud services. Meanwhile, cloud consumers pay more attention to Quality of Service (QoS) such as availability, which measures how well a service is performed. This paper proposes a novel auction approach that can efficiently allocate resources according to customers’ QoS preferences. The QoS-based pricing can generate more revenue than a fixed-price strategy. This research lies at the intersection of cloud computing, economics, and information systems.     

Recruitment and retention in front‐line services: the case of childcare

This article highlights how problems of recruitment and retention in front‐line services create a particular challenge to traditional HRM models and solutions. Private day nurseries make an interesting example of the challenges facing managers in the service sector as the combination of a feminised workforce, a price‐sensitive service, public–private competition and state regulation create particular difficulties. We report on a study of 33 day nurseries involving interviews with managers and employees over an eight‐month period. Our findings show that childcare providers have to cope with recruitment and retention problems associated with high‐end interactive service provision compounded by gender segregation and small business characteristics. Our analysis of employer and employee perspectives examines labour market issues affecting recruitment, and categorises the reasons for staff turnover into internal ‘push’ factors, external ‘pull’ factors, outside factors and functional turnover.     

Spatial price competition in the Manhattan hotel market: The role of location,quality, and online reputation

We investigate whether and to what extent price competition among hotels in Manhattan is driven by geographic location, quality, and online reputation. We investigate (a) which of the three product differentiation dimensions matters most for hotels' pricing decisions and (b) whether and to what extent competition is localized. Results show that hotel quality and geographic location matter the most for price competition. Whereas hotels of similar reputation also react to each other's prices, the effect is less important. Also, results indicate that hotels' prices react most aggressively to prices set by the four nearest hotels in the area.     

基于企业服务营销过程的服务定价研究

随着企业竞争的加剧,企业的竞争优势不仅是产品研发、产品质量等有形保证,服务也成为衡量企业竞争力的重要杠杆。服务营销是指企业在充分认识满足消费者需求的前提下,为充分满足消费者需要在营销过程中所采取的一系列活动。在确定服务价格时,服务企业必须对影响服务定价的各种因素进行全面地把握。     

以差距模型和价值曲线评价模型分析饭店服务质量——以广州香格里拉大酒店为例

饭店服务质量的优劣决定着饭店的命运,其不仅要依靠硬件设施,还需要一系列完善的软件服务,同时根据消费者的需求和期望来提供个性化服务。文章以广州香格里拉大酒店为例,运用差距分析模型和价值曲线评价模型来分析其服务质量,对比当今饭店服务质量发展中存在的问题,提出关于如何提高饭店服务质量的建议。     

Provision and price of child care services: For-profits and nonprofits

We study the market for child care services, with a special focus on examining competition between for- and nonprofits. We estimate a two-stage oligopoly model of product differentiation. The first stage estimates a model of endogenous market structure and the second stage corrects for market structure to examine the prices charged and capacity choices for child care centers. We find that the actions of “same-type” providers have a statistically significant impact on a provider’s entry and pricing decisions but we fail to find evidence that the actions of “other types” have a significant impact. Nonprofit child care providers and Head Start centers do not appear to crowd out for-profit providers. Further, we find that for-profits and nonprofits respond differently to market characteristics generating spatial differences in the types of center available in a market. Our data suggest that for-profits are more likely to enter markets with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students, but they primarily serve those who work, rather than live, in the market. The prevalence of disadvantaged students does not impact the entry decision of nonprofits leaving disadvantaged areas with relatively fewer non-profit options to serve residents. Policies to encourage for-profit daycare would likely lead centers to locate in markets where they can provide service for workers, whereas a policy to encourage nonprofit entry might be more effective in providing low cost care for nearby residents.     

经济型酒店服务能力与顾客满意度的研究

随着改革开放的不断深入,我国经济开始了新一轮的发展,面对市场对经济发展的影响,以满足大众消费需求为目标的经济型酒店如雨后春笋般层出不穷,中国市场中外合资酒店也在不断地扩张,面对如此大的发展压力,经济型酒店该如何满足顾客的需求,这就需要有优秀的服务,较高的服务能力可以使经济型酒店在市场竞争中占有一丝优势。酒店经营效益的好或坏完全取决于酒店的服务质量,不仅如此,顾客的满意度还可以大大降低酒店的运营成本,提高经济型酒店的服务能力将有利于酒店业的发展,推动我国的第三产业发展,使国民经济在上新台阶。     

Learning in Advance Selling with Heterogeneous Consumers

Advance selling occurs when consumers order a firm's product prior to the regular selling season. It reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyers and enables the firm to better forecast its future demand. The distinctive feature of this paper is that there are both experienced and inexperienced consumers, with the former knowing their valuations of the product in advance. We show that pre‐orders from experienced consumers lead to a more precise forecast of future demand by the firm and that the optimal pre‐order price may be at a discount or a premium relative to the regular selling price. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Outsourcing customer support: The role of provider customer focus

An increasing number of firms are outsourcing customer support to external service providers. This creates a triadic setting in which an outsourcing provider serves end customers on behalf of its clients. While outsourcing presents an opportunity to serve customers, service providers differ in their motivation and ability to fulfill customer needs. Prior research suggests that firms with a strong customer focus have an intrinsic motivation to address customer needs. We suggest that in an outsourcing context, this intrinsic motivation does not suffice. Using a Motivation–Opportunity–Ability framework, we posit that the effect of a provider's customer focus will be moderated by a set of relational, firm, and customer characteristics that affect its ability to serve end customers. We test our conceptualization among 171 outsourcing clients from the Netherlands and then validate these results among 135 Indian outsourcing providers. The findings reveal that customer-focused providers achieve higher levels of customer need fulfillment but this effect is contingent on their ability to serve end customers. In particular, customer-focused providers more effectively fulfill customer needs when clients and providers share close relational ties, when clients also have a high level of customer focus, and when end customer needs exhibit a low degree of turbulence. In addition, we find that, in turbulent markets, equipment-related services offer greater opportunity for effective customer need fulfillment than other outsourced services.     

情感营销对顾客感知服务质量的影响研究

情感需求是消费者购买产品和服务时非常关注的一类需求,企业应在营销过程中利用情感要素增强营销效果。情感营销是企业从情感角度来满足顾客的需求,提高顾客感知服务质量。酒店分析情感营销对顾客感知服务质量的各个维度的影响,能为提升酒店服务质量提供有效情感营销策略。     

The benefits of releasing the bell companies from the interexchange restrictions

We foresee substantial benefits to consumers if the regional telephone companies arereleased from the Modified Final Judgement's interexchange services restrictions. Smaller interexchange service customers, largely neglected because of the inadequate competitiveness of the incumbent interexchange carriers, would receive much of these benefits. Since divestiture, state and federal regulatoy agencies have developed a robust set of regulatory safeguards, which would prevent regional telephone companies' anticompetitive actions in the interexchange market. If, instead of theorizing about possibilities, one looks at the actual experience in unregulated post-divestihue regional telephone company markets, one finds no signs of anticompetitive telephone company behavior. The regional telephone companies' access services are experiencing substantial competition. Given those facts, we do not believe that it matters to the health of interexchange competition whether competitors are attacking other regional telephone companies' services. Still, their other services arc being attacked, and this will limit any residual ability of the regional telephone companies to subsidize their interexchange operations by shifting costs to regulated ratepayers. In short, we see substantial benefits and low risks in allowing the regional telephone companies to enter the regional interexchange services market.     

浅谈如何规划酒店员工的职业生涯

二十世纪以来,"竞争"这个词在企业经营和发展中无不与之息息相关,紧密地联系在一起。社会在经历了价格竞争、质量竞争和服务竞争以后,在当今已开始进入了一个崭新的阶段,这就是人才的竞争。特别是对于酒店业来说,随着对外开放步伐的加快和经济的快速发展,酒店业的竞争日趋白日化。酒店要得以发展,必须要留住人才,必须要有一个强大的人才阶梯队伍,而员工的职业生涯规划对于人才阶梯队的创建就会起到非常重要的作用。     

企业商业科普模式在营销中的应用研究

当今时代,企业在硬件方面的差距日益缩小,顾客对企业提供的服务提出了更高的要求。谁能创造出具有鲜明特色的产品,谁就能赢得顾客和市场。商业科普正是以高知识含量为特征,向顾客提供服务的过程,它通过将商品知识传授给顾客,使之产生认同感,从而实现以知识创造市场。     

Sind positiv eingestellte Kunden generell bereit, mehr zu zahlen?

At first sight it appears plausible that customers who display more positive evaluative reactions to a company, which previously had sold goods to them (=?supplier-related attitudes [SRA] such as customer satisfaction or loyalty), generally should be willing to pay higher prices for additional offerings of this supplier than their counterparts with less positive SRA. However, sizes of the respective correlations reported in past empirical research diverge considerably. Therefore, two empirical studies were conducted to explore the extent to which eight socio-demographic and psychographic customer characteristics influence relationships between SRA and willingness to pay intentions in the sense that the characteristics systematically increase or decrease (moderate) the considered relationships. In a first study of 238 customers of power companies, four characteristics (age, female gender, household size, electricity bill) were found to significantly negatively moderate the relationship between customers’ attitude toward their electricity supplier and their price tolerance for “green electricity” and one characteristic (involvement) was detected to have a significant negative moderating influence. A second study of 319 mobile communication customers suggested that customers’ involvement and relationship length with their current mobile services supplier positively moderated the association between the customers’ attitude toward their supplier and willingness to pay for a packet offer of their mobile service provider, whereas female gender exerted a negative moderating influence. The results imply that companies should conduct analyses aiming at the identification of socio-demo- and psychographic moderators or customer segments with heterogeneous impacts of SRA on behavioral price intentions respectively as part of their marketing planning process.     

Strategic behavior in a service industry

A model of service duopoly is formulated, where the arrival of customers and their service time in the firm are stochastic. The firms first choose the service capacity, and given the capacity they then choose the price in a Bertrand competition. Capacity choices have a negative externality on the competitor, since increased capacity in one firm decreases its expected full price (price plus cost of waiting) and leads to a flow of customers from the other firm. If the firms choose capacities strategically, it is optimal to underinvest compared to the non‐strategic case, but this result may arise in different ways. By underinvesting the firms commit themselves to longer queues (lower quality) to relax price competition. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

谈酒店个性化服务

酒店的个性化服务作为一种超越酒店常规服务的服务，不仅在酒店业中日益占据重要的地位，也逐渐成为酒店在激烈的市场竞争中最具有优势的武器之一。文章介绍了酒店个性化服务的概念、种类及特点，提出了实施个性化服务的对策，以期对增强酒店竞争力，加快酒店业的发展有所借鉴。