Impact of Customer Traffic and Service Process Outsourcing Levels on e‐Retailer Operational Performance

Many service firms deliver services via a mix of internally developed and delivered (i.e., insourced) and externally developed and delivered (i.e., outsourced) service processes. Service process outsourcing is especially common in e‐retailing. Portions of e‐retail customer ordering processes and delivery processes can be digitized and contracted to third‐party vendors. Via outsourcing, service systems change from dyadic to triadic. Prior research examines consumer perceptions of dyadic (consumer to e‐retailer) outcomes, but little research considers service co‐delivery with outsourcing partners (i.e., triadic systems). Literature also does not focus on joint associations of service process outsourcing and customer traffic with e‐retailer operations. We analyze several years of data on North American e‐retailers. We first examine factors associated with e‐retailer outsourcing levels, for front‐end and back‐end service processes. We observe customer traffic is positively associated with future outsourcing. We then examine how outsourcing moderates associations between contemporaneous customer traffic and e‐retailer operational performance, as measured by numbers of processed orders, website response times, and customer satisfaction. Results suggest outsourcing levels are associated with operational outcomes, yet surprisingly, high outsourcing and high traffic jointly may not benefit e‐retailers.     

Analysis of Effects of Operational Execution on Repeat Purchasing for Heterogeneous Customer Segments

Many retailers are increasingly turning to home delivery as a new arena of operational competition. This study controlled for industry by investigating the online home delivery grocery business, and an analysis of 1,919 customers of home delivery grocers identified four groups of online customers based on reasons for selecting this service. These four groups were next linked to operational execution in terms of service, product, and Internet quality, and found to vary in predicable ways. Subsequent to the initial data collection, five month's of post hoc longitudinal purchasing history was collected on the four groups of online customers to determine the relative profitability. Finally, as a follow‐on analysis, the study used regression to predict future consumer purchases based upon operational execution. Time savings and service quality emerged as the two most important independent variables in terms of future buying from such online home delivery services.     

The Influence of Service Orientation on B2B e‐Service Capabilities: An Empirical Investigation

E‐Services, or the company's portfolio of service offerings available to its customers through the Internet, are an emerging area of interest to operations management. Yet little is known about the operations and capabilities needed for provision of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐services. This paper aims to make a contribution toward closing this gap. First, we develop a new construct of B2B e‐service capability, a term that captures a generic set of five interrelated and complementary dimensions: (1) e‐service recovery, (2) e‐customization, (3) ease of navigation, (4) service portfolio comprehensiveness, and (5) information richness. These combined operational abilities are associated with B2B service delivery, including its portal design, technology architecture, and mix of product and service offerings. They are posited to be necessary for delivering effective B2B e‐services. We also argue that, both service orientation (SO) and customer receptivity to technology, influence B2B e‐service capability. We empirically test a path model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 181 businesses that have deployed B2B e‐services. We find that the influence of SO on performance is not direct but rather mediated by the e‐service capability, a finding that holds for both goods producers and service providers. We suggest that a firm's SO may mitigate industrial customers' resistance toward conducting business online.     

Usability of Online Services: The Role of Technology Readiness and Context*

An important prerequisite for the success of any online service is ensuring that customers' experience—via the interface—satisfies both sensory and functional needs. Developing interfaces that are responsive to customers' needs requires a perspective on interface design as well as a deep understanding of the customers themselves. Drawing upon research in consumer behavior concerning consumer beliefs about technology, we deploy an alternative way to describe customers based on psychographic characteristics. Technology readiness (TR), a multidimensional psychographic construct, offers a way to segment online customers based upon underlying positive and negative technology beliefs. The core premise of this study is that the beliefs form the foundation for expectations of how things should work and how specific online service interfaces are evaluated by customers. At the same time, usability evaluations of specific online services might be contingent on contextual factors, specifically the type of site (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and access method (Web vs. wireless Web). The aspects of usability examined here are those incorporated into the usability metric and instrument based on the Microsoft Usability Guidelines (MUG). The results of an empirical study with 160 participants indicate that (i) TR customer segments vary in usability requirements and (ii) usability evaluations of specific online service interfaces are influenced by complex interactions among site type, access method, and TR segment membership. As organizations continue to expand their online service offerings, managers must recognize that the interface exists to serve the customers, so their design must be matched to market needs and TR.     

Focusing on Customer Time in Field Service: A Normative Approach

Although customer convenience should be rightfully considered a central element in field services, the customer experience suggests that service enterprises rarely take the customer's preferred time into account in making operational and scheduling decisions. In this paper we present the results of our exploratory research into two interrelated topics: the explicit inclusion of customer time in nonemergency field service delivery decisions and the analysis of trade‐off between the customer's convenience and field service provider's cost. Based on prior research in service quality we identify and illustrate two time‐based performance metrics that are particularly appropriate for assessing service quality in nonemergency field services: performance and conformance quality. To determine vehicle routes, we develop a hybrid heuristic derived from the existing and proven heuristic methods. A numerical example closely patterned after real‐life data is generated and used within a computational experiment to investigate alternate policies for promise time windows. Our experiment shows that over a reasonable range of customer cost parameters the policy of shorter promise time windows reduces the combined total cost incurred by the provider and the customers and should be considered a preferred policy by the field service provider. Managerial implications of this result are discussed.     

Multichannels Strategy Implementation: The Role of Channel Alignment Capabilities*

A firm's distribution channels represent a key portfolio of resources that can be leveraged for competitive advantage. One approach to this portfolio that has become increasingly important in recent years is multichannel distribution (MCD). While this strategy has important benefits in terms of market coverage and firm performance, the use of multiple channels seriously affects downstream channel roles such as service delivery, as the financial rewards to channel members and the services they offer are separated. A channel member who offers poor or no service can free‐ride on the services offered to the same customer from a different channel. We draw on agency theory to explain these negative consequences. Additionally, the resource‐based view of the firm along with capabilities theory provides two key means of alleviating these consequences: channel tracking capabilities and reward alignment capabilities. The study, conducted in an industry facing serious MCD issues (the outdoor sporting goods industry), used key informant data matched to secondary data. Our results show that managers can reap the performance rewards of MCD strategies while minimizing its negative consequences. In particular, monitoring practices such as frequent site visits and phone contact with customers develop the firm's channel tracking capabilities, allowing managers to better monitor downstream activities. This becomes particularly important as the complexity from having multiple channels increases. Likewise, reward alignment capabilities such as retail price maintenance agreements and cooperative advertising enable the manager to minimize conflict among channel participants by ensuring sufficient profitability for all channel members.     

Pareto‐Improving Contracts for Express Package Delivery Services

We address the problem of an express package delivery company in structuring a long‐term customer contract whose terms may include prices that differ by day‐of‐week and by speed‐of‐service. The company traditionally offered speed‐of‐service pricing to its customers, but without day‐of‐week differentiation, resulting in customer demands with considerable day‐of‐week seasonality. The package delivery company hoped that using day‐of‐week and speed‐of‐service price differentiation for contract customers would induce these customers to adjust their demands to become counter‐cyclical to the non‐contract demand. Although this usually cannot be achieved by pricing alone, we devise an approach that utilizes day‐of‐week and speed‐of‐service pricing as an element of a Pareto‐improving contract. The contract provides the lowest‐cost arrangement for the package delivery company while ensuring that the customer is at least as well off as he would have been under the existing pricing structure. The contract pricing smoothes the package delivery company's demand and reduces peak requirements for transport capacity. The latter helps to decrease capital costs, which may allow a further price reduction for the customer. We formulate the pricing problem as a biconvex optimization model, and present a methodology for designing the contract and numerical examples that illustrate the achievable savings.     

Optimal Uniform Pricing Strategy of a Service Firm When Facing Two Classes of Customers

When facing heterogeneous customers, how should a service firm make its pricing decision to maximize revenue? If discrimination is allowed, then priority schemes and differentiated pricing are often used to achieve that. In many applications, however, the firm cannot or is not allowed to set discriminatory prices, for example, list price in retail stores, online shopping, and gas stations; thus a uniform price must be applied to all customers. This study addresses the optimal uniform pricing problem of a service firm using a queueing system with two classes of customers. Our result shows that the potential pool of customers plays a central role in the firm's optimal decision. Depending on the range of system parameters, which are determined explicitly by the primitive data, the firm's optimal strategy may choose to serve only one class of customers, a subset of a class of customers, or a combination of different classes of customers. In addition, the optimal price is in general not monotonic with respect to the potential market sizes because their changes may lead to a major shift in the firm's decision on which customer class to serve. However, unless such a shift occurs, the optimal price is weakly decreasing in the potential market sizes.     

First Step in Social Media: Measuring the Influence of Online Management Responses on Customer Satisfaction

With the growing influence of online social media, firms increasingly take an active role in interacting with consumers in social media. For many firms, their first step in online social media is management responses, where the management responds to customers' comments about the firm or its products and services. In this article, we measure the impact of management responses on customer satisfaction using data retrieved from a major online travel agency in China. Applying a panel data model that controls for regression toward the mean and heterogeneity in individual preference for hotels, we find that online management responses are highly effective among low satisfaction customers but have limited influence on other customers. Moreover, we show that the public nature of online management responses introduces a new dynamic among customers. Although online management responses increase future satisfaction of the complaining customers who receive the responses, they decrease future satisfaction of complaining customers who observe but do not receive management responses. The result is consistent with the peer‐induced fairness theory.     

顾客满意度不确定性对服务质量评价的影响

在以顾客为中心的时代,企业服务质量的评价直接依赖于顾客满意度的高低,而顾客满意度的评价结果往往是基于某种评价等级的一个分布.论文研究顾客满意度评价的不确定性对服务质量总体评价的影响,结果表明在服务质量的评价中存在着一种“反射现象”,即当服务质量总体水平处于满意的状态下,管理者追求的是保持和稳定,展现出对不确定性的厌恶;而当服务质量总体水平处于不满意的状态时,管理者力图改变和进步,展现出对不确定性的偏爱,而且,顾客满意度评价的负面结果要比同等程度的正面结果对服务质量总体评价的影响要大.这些现象在两项实证研究中获得了中高层管理人员的确认.作者进一步建立了一个在顾客满意度有不确定性情况下服务质量评价的模型.     

考虑自取服务和门到门服务的电动汽车物流网络优化策略研究

在环境意识增长与政府政策支持的有利条件下,电动汽车在物流领域得以快速发展。为提高物流服务的效率,降低企业运营成本,文中研究了考虑顾客服务策略的电动物流汽车服务设施选址与配送路径问题。采取顾客自行取货与配送人员送货上门相结合的多样化服务策略,使得服务站点的建设成本、顾客点配送路径成本以及服务站点补货路径成本之和最小。建立了整数规划数学模型,允许配送车辆在服务过程中前往服务站点接受充电服务。其次,提出了基于改进节约算法和禁忌算法的混合启发式算法MCWSA-TS。随后,在小规模算例将CPLEX运算结果与MCWSA-TS进行对比,证明了算法的有效性。最后,采用多组算例探讨了顾客取货半径对运营成本的影响,并对分离配送策略与联合配送策略进行对比分析。实验结果表明,多样化服务策略有助于企业满足顾客取货时间和取货方式的个性化需求。同时,兼顾运营成本与顾客满意度,促进电动汽车参与的物流服务快速发展。     

Are Self‐Service Customers Satisfied or Stuck?

This paper investigates the impact of self‐service technology (SST) usage on customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically, we disentangle the distinct effects of satisfaction and switching costs as drivers of retention among self‐service customers. Our empirical analysis examines 26,924 multi‐channel customers of a nationwide retail bank. We track each customer's channel usage, overall satisfaction, and retention over a 1‐year period. We find that, relative to face‐to‐face service, customers who use self‐service channels for a greater proportion of their transactions are either no more satisfied, or less satisfied with the service they receive, depending on the channel. However, we also find that these same customers are predictably less likely to defect to a competitor if they are heavily reliant on self‐service channels characterized by high switching costs. Through a mediation model, we demonstrate that, when self‐service usage promotes retention, it does so in a way that is consistent with switching costs. As a robustness check, we examine the behavior of channel enthusiasts, who concentrate transactions among specific channels. Relative to more diversified customers, we find that self‐service enthusiasts in low switching cost channels defect with greater frequency, while self‐service enthusiasts in high switching cost channels are retained with greater frequency.     

服务供应链管理、顾客满意与企业绩效

本研究构建了服务供应链管理活动同顾客满意及企业绩效间的结构方程模型,并以来自中国民航服务业的数据进行了实证分析。结果显示服务企业的领导力不仅对服务供应链的战略管理和运作管理活动有正影响效应,还对企业服务信息系统的构建有积极影响;企业文化对企业战略层面的服务供应链管理计划、协作关系的构建、整合服务资源等服务供应链战略管理活动有显著影响;服务供应链战略管理活动、运作管理活动和顾客信息系统的构建通过有效提升顾客满意感、可以增加企业绩效。     

道歉承诺类管理反馈策略对顾客二次满意度的影响——基于顾客多样情绪调节效应

O2O模式下，众多学者和商家都关注何种在线管理反馈策略能提升顾客满意度，然而多数研究仅针对顾客负向情绪，忽略了顾客多样情绪对在线管理反馈策略影响的调节作用。实际上顾客在接受在线管理反馈时带有矛盾情绪，表现为多种情绪。因此本文针对消费者多样情绪，研究不同情绪调节下道歉承诺类管理反馈策略与顾客满意度之间的关系。通过梳理在线管理反馈策略、顾客满意度、顾客多样情绪等相关研究，提出代表顾客多样情绪的在线评论类型包括：积极评论、偏积极评论、消极评论、偏消极评论，研究不同类型评论（顾客多样情绪）对顾客满意度有不同影响；道歉承诺类管理反馈策略对顾客二次满意度有积极影响；不同类型在线评论（消费者多样情绪）对道歉承诺类管理反馈策略的积极影响有调节作用等假设。本文以国内某旅行网站99027名顾客二次入住酒店数据为样本，用机器学习的方法对顾客评论和管理反馈策略进行分类，通过多元线性回归模型进行实证分析，结果表明：（1）偏积极评论、偏消极评论、消极评论对顾客二次满意度有负向影响；（2）道歉承诺类管理反馈策略对顾客二次满意度有积极作用；（3）顾客偏消极、消极情绪能够加强道歉承诺类管理反馈策略对顾客二次满意度的正向影响，即道歉承诺在调节顾客的消极情绪方面具有一定的积极作用。研究结果丰富了在线管理反馈策略理论和方法，为服务商进行在线管理反馈时应采取的措施提供了一些参考，对服务商通过第三方平台加强顾客关系管理具有一定的指导意义。     

Satisfying and Retaining Customers through Independent Service Representatives

The degree of leverage possessed by manufacturers who outsource their customer service function to channel partners over customer satisfaction and loyalty is assessed empirically. Data provided by independent service representatives are linked with data from their customers. Results indicate that a manufacturer's support of its representatives increases their job satisfaction which, in turn, is indirectly linked to the customer satisfaction through shared perceptions of service performance and quality. However, the strength of the effects is modest, suggesting that manufacturers may need to consider direct customer contact strategies or contractual means of assuring customer satisfaction when independent service representatives “own the customer.” Conceptually, the hypothesized shared mindset model is tested against the competing affect transfer model, resulting in support for the former. Job satisfaction moderates the degree of agreement between representatives' and customers' perceptions of service performance and quality such that greater agreement occurs when job satisfaction is high.     

Self‐Service Operations at Retail Stores: The Role of Inter‐Customer Interactions

Inter‐customer interactions are important to the operation of self‐services in retail settings. More specifically, when self‐service terminals are used as part of customers’ checkout processes in retail operations without the explicit involvement of retailers as the direct service providers, inter‐customer interactions become a significant managerial issue. In this article, we examine the impact of inter‐customer interactions at retail self‐service terminals on customers’ service quality perceptions and repeat purchase intentions at retail stores. We conduct a scenario‐based experimental design (N = 674) using a 2 × 2 factorial design in which inter‐customer interactions are divided into “positive” vs. “negative” and occur during the “waiting” or during the actual “transaction” stages of self‐services at a retail store. We use attribution theory to develop the hypotheses. The results demonstrate that, through their interactions, fellow customers can exert influences on a focal customer's quality perceptions and repeat purchasing intentions toward a retail store. Furthermore, these influences were impacted by how customers attribute blame or assign responsibility toward the retail store. Service operations managers should leverage these interactions by designing into self‐service settings the capacities and interfaces that are best suited for customers’ co‐production of their self‐service experiences.     

服务补救悖论形成机理研究

探明服务补救悖论的形成过程对服务失误的控制和服务补救策略的制定都具有重要的意义。本研究以满意度变化过程为主线揭示服务补救悖论形成的全过程。研究发现:服务补救悖论形成过程可由服务失误和服务补救两个不同的过程来描述,在服务失误过程中,失误频率、失误严重性和感知失误可控性都会显著促使顾客满意度降低,其中,失误严重性的影响最大;在服务补救过程中,实物和非实物补救水平都可以恢复消费者的满意度,并且二者的差异不大;关系强度对这两个过程的满意度变化均具有显著的调节作用,其中,关系强度低的顾客对于失误频率和失误严重性更加敏感,并且更注重实物补救水平。     

Product and service innovation with customer recognition

Product and service innovation is important for brands to succeed in a competitive marketplace. As information technology advances, customer recognition becomes a growing industry trend; that is, brands track customers' purchase history, recognize and price discriminate between repeat and new customers.The trend of customer recognition has changed the nature and intensity of competition between brands. In this article, we examine how customer recognition and the associated changes in competition affect brands' incentives to invest in product and service innovation. We find that when brands have similar equity, customer recognition increases brands' incentives to invest in product and service innovation. However, when brands have sufficiently different equity, customer recognition leads the stronger brand to invest more and the weaker brand to invest less in product and service innovation. In addition, extant literature suggests that customer recognition reduces brand profits. In contrast, we find that customer recognition can increase the weaker brand's profit but decreases it more for the stronger brand. Thus, collecting customers' purchase history data for customer recognition can be beneficial for weaker brands but detrimental for stronger brands.     

Pricing and Operational Performance in Discretionary Services

In many services, for example, website or landscape design, the value or quality derived by a customer depends upon the service time, and this valuation differs across customers. Customers procure the service based on the expected value to be delivered, prices charged, and the timeliness of service. We investigate the performance of the optimal pricing scheme as well as two commonly used pricing schemes (fixed fee and time‐based pricing) for such services on important dimensions such as revenue, demand served, and utilization. We propose a novel model that captures the above features and wherein both service rate and demand are endogenous and functions of the pricing scheme. In particular, service time is an outcome of the pricing scheme adopted and the heterogeneous valuations of customers, unlike in the queueing‐based pricing literature. We find that the service system may benefit from a greater variance in consumer valuations, and the performance of pricing schemes is impacted by the shape of the distribution of customers' valuation of service time and the responsiveness desired by customers. Both the fixed fee and time‐based schemes do well relative to the optimal pricing scheme in terms of revenue in many plausible scenarios, but there are substantial differences between the pricing schemes in some important operational metrics. For instance, the fixed fee scheme serves more customers and has higher utilization than the time‐based scheme. We also explore variants of the fixed and time‐based schemes that have better revenue performance and show that the two‐part tariff which is a combination of fixed and time‐based pricing can do as well as the optimal scheme in terms of revenue.