FMEA-based portfolio approach to service productivity improvement

The conceptual approach has contributed significantly to service productivity, but it should be complemented by practical deliverable methods. This paper proposes a systematic framework for improving service productivity by employing the failure mode and effect analysis-based portfolio approach. By structuring and decomposing a service into a set of sub-processes, failure and innovation modes are identified and evaluated using different constituents, such as the severity and occurrence of failure mode, and the impacts and feasibilities of innovation modes. Innovation and failure portfolios are constructed, clarifying the values of opportunities. To illustrate the function of the proposed approach, hospital service is used as an example.     

Service failures and recovery strategies of chain restaurants in Taiwan

This study utilised the critical incident technique to study service failure and recovery strategies in chain restaurants. A total of 431 incidents were collected and classified. The analytical results identified the most common categories as being service failure and recovery strategy. It also demonstrates that consumers were unable to recognise high-quality service and high-consistency products in chain restaurants. Additionally, appropriate recovery strategies were proposed to assist restaurateurs in reducing service failure. A number of conclusions and recommendations regarding practice and future research are made.     

A Gap Analysis of a CPA Tax Service and the Implications for Enhancing Service Quality

ABSTRACT

Certified Public Accounting (CPA) firms are “pure” services where the customer is buying the knowledge and expertise of the accounting professional. Marketing the “expertise” of certified public accounting firms is challenging because the client's expected and perceived levels of service quality is not clearly understood. This article presents a service blueprint of an income tax service and highlights potential failure points that can impact process and outcome qualities. Some recommendations are made for improving the tax service to achieve higher levels of service quality.     

Exploring the Ordinal Classifications of Failure Modes in the Reliability Management: An Optimization-Based Consensus Model with Bounded Confidences

Group Decision and Negotiation - Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a system activity that identifies, evaluates and eliminates potential failure modes (FMs) in a system/process to enhance...     

Reliability evaluation of healthcare services by assessing the technical efficiency

Classical reliability analysis techniques of manufacturing and defence industries are not a perfect fit for the assessment of the reliability of services. This is partly due to the lack of proper and valid reliability testing procedures in service systems and complications faced in identifying critical service parameters. Since most prominent performance indicators of a system can be associated with the maximum overall reliability it achieves, then factors that degrade the reliability can be identified with respect to its superior peers. This study utilizes the data envelopment analysis for the evaluation of reliability in service systems with a focus on healthcare. This approach comparably evaluates the performance of a service provider over a period of time by means of failure rates and identifies the factors affecting unreliable time phases. Application of the proposed method is illustrated with a private Turkish hospital along with an example of failure mode and effect analysis for inpatient treatment.     

An integrated model of service experience design improvement

Service experience design, addressing an overall experience problem with user-centered design thinking is a critical issue. This study proposes an integrated model of service experience assessment that addresses the relationship between user value and experience based on the importance and satisfaction concept. Refined improvement index of this study was developed for the determination of improvement priority. The paper then presents an empirical study of 3C (computer, communication, consumer-electronics) retail stores in which the proposed model was used to identify the critical servicescape items requiring improvement, and ranked on the strategies of improvement. The model requires a systematic approach to (i) examine the performance of these retail service processes; (ii) determine the items to be improved; and (iii) select appropriate and feasible strategies to improve these items. This integrated model is valuable for practical implementation in service firms to investigate and prioritize service design actions based on user experience data gathered from service sites.     

两级物流服务商参与的供应链最优决策与利益分配研究——基于多种合作模式视角

在两级物流服务商参与的供应链系统中存在一条由制造商与零售商构成的产品供应链（PSC）和另一条由物流服务集成商和物流服务提供商构成的物流服务供应链（LSSC）。通过分析两方合作、多方合作等不同决策模式下的博弈情形，得出在两方合作决策模式下，对于LSSC来讲，集中决策属于占优战略，而当物流服务水平敏感系数与零售价格敏感系数满足一定条件时，PSC会选择集中决策；系统集中决策模式、三方合作决策模式、两方合作决策模式下的系统总利润、物流服务水平和产品销量依次递减；采用Nash谈判模型及最小核心法设计了不同合作模式下的供应链利益分配机制，实现供应链协调；最后，通过数值分析验证了相关命题的研究结论和利益分配机制的有效性，并在此基础上提出了未来可深入研究的领域与方向。     

The Importance of Hotel Employee Service Attitude and the Satisfaction of International Tourists

Although there have been numerous studies dealing with service attitude and customer satisfaction, they have not specifically addressed international hotel customers. Moreover, most of them have discussed the subject from the viewpoint of the employee. This study takes a customer perception approach and emphasises critical factors (elements) of service attitude affecting the satisfaction of international tourists. It has been found that the importance of employee attitudes to service and the level of satisfaction with the service vary significantly among customers of different nationalities. For example, American travellers emphasise elements such as employees being able to solve their problems, and so are dissatisfied with the service when employees lack an adequate command of English. Taiwanese customers stress the importance of employees treating customers politely regardless of their attire. They feel that they are treated unfairly because of employee expectations of tips from well-dressed customers. These findings could furnish managers with useful information for planning marketing and personnel training.     

GATS与国际健康服务贸易综述

国际健康服务贸易的兴起给发展中国家带来了贸易获利的机会,但也会对其国民健康体系造成冲击并加剧本已存在的健康服务不平等问题。按照GATS对国际服务贸易的定义,国际健康服务贸易相应也有四种模式,不同的模式发生的动因有所不同,其对发展中国家带来的经济影响也有差异。发展中国家如何促进其健康服务贸易发展并缓解健康服务不平等问题,要考虑健康服务贸易的政策壁垒,从公共政策和贸易政策方面进行调整。     

基于循环创新链的物流企业集群服务创新体系研究

文章通过对物流企业集群服务创新的分析,基于循环创新链模式,提出了一种集群内组织边界开放、组织相互协作的服务创新链,分析了服务创新链的结构、节点模型和能力势差,构建了以服务创新链为基础的物流企业集群服务创新体系,并给出了天津滨海新区国际物流中心的实例分析,期望为天津以至我国物流企业集群服务创新体系的建设提供一定的决策支持。     

发展中国家服务贸易动态比较优势分析

国际服务贸易的快速发展和结构升级导致发展中国家服务贸易传统比较优势丧失.通过对印度、韩国、新加坡、爱尔兰发展服务贸易的案例研究,总结出发展中国家发展动态比较优势的基本模式和政策路径.发展中国家要摆脱贸易困境,应借鉴动态比较优势理论,巩固现有优势,培育新的要素,发展潜在优势,实现要素和比较优势升级.     

Examining Public Hospital Service Failure: The Influence of Service Failure Type,Service Expectations,and Attribution on Consumer Response

This study investigates three independent variables; types of service failure, service expectations, and attribution on postfailure responses in healthcare. A between-subjects 3?×?2?×?2 experimental design using written scenarios was used. The findings demonstrate that customer responses to service failures in hospitals are extensively influenced by the type of service failure, the level of service expectation of the provider, and, to a lesser extent, the controllability of the cause of the failure. Core service failures lead to greater increases in negative responses for satisfaction, emotional, and behavioral responses than supplementary service failure with high service expectations protecting the provider against overall dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and switching behaviors. Interestingly, perceived high controllability leads to greater dissatisfaction but not to increased negative emotional or behavioral responses. The study applies attribution theory to explain the results. The article concludes with managerial implications.     

Individual Differences Among Service Employees

SUMMARY

To do an excellent job of managing external relationships, service firms must be prepared to do an excellent job of managing internal relationships. This effort begins with recruiting, selecting, and retaining employees who are likely to serve customers well. While service firms strive to match the knowledge, ability, and skills of potential employees to the requirements of the job, most do not have the time or the resources to implement elaborate recruitment and selection systems. This is especially true among services where relatively high turnover levels mandate that recruitment and selection processes be fast and inexpensive. To meet this challenge, managers often focus on a set of easily identifiable individual characteristics, such as experience, job tenure, age, or education that can be assessed during the time of an interview or scan of a job application. This study examines the effect of these characteristics on the attitudes and responses of service employees that are critical for the effective delivery of quality service (job satisfaction, self-efficacy, role stress, organizational commitment). The results indicate that satisfied and committed service employees tend to be older, better educated, and possess a great deal of service experience. These employees also appear to be better able to handle the stress associated with service positions. These characteristics are atypical of the service industry, where employees tend to be younger, possess relatively little experience in any one industry, and are less educated. Implications for managing the recruitment, selection, and retention of service employees are offered, as are directions for future research.     

一种新型通用无线定位增值服务平台

基于现有无线定位系统种类多、覆盖范围小、业务单一的缺点,本文提出了一种新型开放式通用无线定位增值服务平台。该通用定位平台构架于现有的多个无线定位网络并独立于具体的无线通信网络,从而使定位功能和服务范围得到增强,适用于独立于无线通信网络的通用无线定位服务专业运营商。本文给出了通用无线定位增值服务平台的系统结构,然后讨论了基于GSM和3GPPParlayAPI规范的无线定位增值服务平台中间件功能层的定义以及该服务平台的功能,最后介绍了该增值服务平台可为独立的服务提供商提供的基于位置信息的具体应用。     

When service fails: The role of the salesperson and the customer

Service failures and consequent recoveries have been identified as a critical determinant of customer retention. Hence, effective service recovery programs warrant further exploration. In particular, with the current emphasis on relationship selling, salespeople should learn how to improvise to serve their customers effectively, including solving problems when service failure occurs. Therefore, alternatives to current common practices in industry should be investigated. The results of the present study suggest that by providing customers a choice of service recovery options, salespeople can augment customers' sense of control and ultimately their satisfaction with the service recovery and the overall service transaction. The investigation also proposed that customer satisfaction would be contingent upon the importance of the service. However, study findings revealed that this was not the case. Implications of the findings are also discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Consumer Reactions to Unethical Service Recovery

Ethical business practices have been widely prescribed, but why? Consumer’s views on unethical business practices have been studied, but possibly more important to marketers and researchers are consumer actions and reactions to unethical business practices and the businesses themselves. Do consumers react negatively, or in such a way as to "punish" the unethical business? If so, what is the nature and extent of the punishment? This research seeks answers to these questions by examining consumer reactions, such as complaining and switching, to instances of unethical business practices. Using equity theory, this research proposes that consumers should be willing to tolerate some unethical behavior as long as they feel their investments and outcomes remain proportionately equal. Consumers who perceive that their outcome/investment ratio is proportionately unequal to their comparison other will respond by switching or complaining. In this research consumers were exposed to two types of service failures with different levels of service recovery in vignettes. Costs incurred by the consumer during the service transaction were also manipulated in the vignettes. Significant differences were found for complaint behavior in the failure recovery vignettes tested. Specifically, voice complaint was higher in the high cost service encounters in both types of services tested. The recovery attempt used (ethical, unethical, or none) led to significance differences in the variables of complaint, voice complaint, satisfaction, and quality. Higher satisfaction and quality ratings were found for the ethical recovery attempt and higher intentions to use complaint and voice complaint in the unethical recovery attempts. One significant interaction between cost and recovery attempt was found. Intentions to use voice complaint were higher in the high cost situations of ethical and unethical recovery, while approaching equality at the no recovery attempt.     

Is the system reliability profitable for retailing and consumer service of a dynamical system under cross-price elasticity of demand?

Retailing strategy is one of the most crucial factors for industries. A proper retailing strategy can help to enhance consumer service and increase the industry's profit. An improved approach to retailing is suggested in this research to deliver superior customer service while maximizing profits in a dynamic system. The study analyzes a retailing strategy for a demand with cross-price elasticity upon the retail price. A product's cross-price elasticity and the system reliability are critical factors in retailing. Understanding the cross-price elasticity of demand between products helps retailers to make pricing decisions that maximize profits by maintaining demand. Imperfect products are produced due to an imperfect production system. The imperfect ones must be adjusted with some costs to make them perfect for better retailing. The system failure rate is crucial for retailing under cross-price elasticity of demand patterns. Production system reliability, cross-price elasticity of demand, and consumer service are all essential factors that can impact a company's success in the market. The production rate is considered time- and system failure rate-dependent. Contradictory to the literature, a dynamical system is proposed for improved retail management, which is solved using the Euler-Lagrange theory. Finally, one can achieve the expected maximum profit for this retail system with optimum selling prices for different products by reducing the system failure rate. Some numerical illustrations with graphical representations are provided to validate the current study. Numerical examples show that applying cross-price elasticity of demand for more than two identical products provides 35% more profit for the retail industry than a single type of product.     

全球发展服务外包的多重模式及其对我国的启示

服务外包是现代服务业的一种新业态．即企业将信息服务和商务流程等业务发包给企业外第三方服务提供者,以降低成本。优化产业链提升企业核心竞争力。由于全球服务外包的迅速发展以及其所蕴藏的巨大发展潜力,我国已经把服务外包作为发展经济的一个新增长点。国际经验表明,运用适当模式将极大地促进服务外包的发展。本文对全球发展服务外包的多重模式进行了研究,并在我国发展服务外包动因和优势分析的基础上,提出以多重模式加快发展我国服务外包的建议。     

Critical Success Factors of Service Orientation in Information Systems Engineering

Service orientation has been a major buzz-word in recent years. While the buzz is on a decline, organizations are slowly, but steadily moving towards service oriented designs. However, service orientation turns out to be as much of a managerial challenge as of a technical one. The most important complexity drivers in the service oriented design of information systems seem to be (a) inconsistent design goals of stakeholders and (b) the pursuit of exhaustive service orientation coverage. This research focuses on the following two questions: (1) What are the characteristics of successful implementations of service oriented information systems, and (2) what are the critical success factors influencing, driving and/or, determining these characteristics? Data of an empirical analysis is used to test a set of cause-effect relationship hypotheses based on nine latent variables. In the core of this model we differentiate the variables “overall service orientation infrastructure success” and “service orientation project success”. The hypothesized interrelationships between the nine variables lead to a causal model which is proven to hold.     

The Service Industries Journal: Its Ethos and Emphases

This study investigates the dynamics of customer affection and customer trust on customer loyalty intention after cases of service failure and recovery. The results demonstrate that after customers experience service failure and recovery, customer affection has a greater influence on customer trust but less in loyalty intention, whereas customer trust becomes more influential in loyalty intention in comparison to the time prior to a service failure. The findings suggest that the rebuilding of loyalty after a service failure and recovery relies primarily on the recovery of trust and that the key determinant of trust recovery is customer affection. Theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.