Cautions on the Use of the SERVQUAL Measure to Assess the Quality of Information Systems Services

The SERVQUAL questionnaire (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1988) is one of the preeminent instruments for measuring the quality of services as perceived by the customer. In a recent Decision Sciences article, Kettinger and Lee (1995) suggested the use of a modified SERVQUAL instrument to assess the quality of the services supplied by an information services provider. However, a number of problems with the SERVQUAL instrument are discussed in the literature. This article provides an illustrative example utilizing data collected from 138 executive and information systems professional customers of a multibillion dollar information services provider in order to examine the validity and reliability of Kettinger and Lee's (1995) modified SERVQUAL instrument. Results of analyses do not confirm the findings of Kettinger and Lee. Moreover, it appears that the use of difference scores in calculating SERVQUAL contributes to problems with the reliability, discriminant validity, convergent validity, and predictive validity of the measure. These findings suggest that caution should be exercised in the use of SERVQUAL scores and that further work is needed in the development of measures for assessing the quality of information services.     

效率参数不可观测下的SaaS云外包合约研究

客户企业在实施SaaS（软件即服务,Software as a Service）云外包时,面临因效率参数不可观测所引发的云服务提供商（Cloud Service Provider,CSP）道德风险问题。针对该问题,以激励机制设计方法为基础,以客户企业期望收益最大化为目标,在服务产出为公共信息,而效率参数信息为CSP私人信息下研究如何通过外包合约的设计诱使CSP显示出真实的信息,并付出最优的努力水平。研究表明,最优努力水平、服务报酬支付是效率参数的减函数;客户企业向CSP提供的最优合约可以用线性合约表示;在由固定服务报酬及收益共享构成的线性合约中,效率参数与固定服务报酬支付正相关,与收益共享系数负相关。     

The ambiguity of social return policies in the Netherlands

Social procurement policies, which aim to create employment opportunities for vulnerable groups, such as the long‐term unemployed and the disabled, have become increasingly popular in recent years. Despite their growing popularity, empirical research on this topic is limited. Combining insights from the social policy and public administration literatures, we explore the development and implementation of “social return” policies by the Dutch government. These policies are a form of social procurement that require private employers to spend a percentage of public tenders to hire individuals far removed from the labor market. Social procurement appears, by definition, to be a form of social investment. However, our analysis of the ideas underlying its use in the Netherlands suggests that significant contradictions exist, with evidence of neoliberal New Public Management tendencies, social investment, and the more recent form of public administration, New Public Service. Using extensive document analysis of parliamentary documents, discussions and evaluative reports from 2008 to 2014, we reveal the tensions inherent in the Dutch approach and discuss possible implications for our understanding of social policy and administration as well as social protection.     

Service Businesses and Productivity*

The records of superior performance of selected service firms over many years suggest that they may be more productive than others. This article uses the Theory of Swift, Even Flow to explain why that might be true. In the process, this article improves Schmenner's 1986 service process matrix. The redefinition of the axes of this matrix and of the resulting diagonal leads to enhanced understanding of productivity for service operations and helps to explain how some leading service companies have been able to sustain their competitive positions for decades.     

The Impact of Process Variation on Customer Dissatisfaction: Evidence from the U.S. Domestic Airline Industry

This paper investigates how process variation reduction affects customer dissatisfaction in the context of the U.S. domestic airline industry. We use quarterly data on all major carriers, available since the introduction of required reporting of service indicators to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). Specifically, we investigate how both average performance and variation performance (consistency) of certain processes affect customer dissatisfaction. Our empirical results show that the relationship between process variation and customer dissatisfaction is contingent upon a company's average performance with regard to each process. Consistency is at least as important as average performance for high performers, while it has limited impact for low performers.     

论酒店顾客感知服务质量的控制

当今酒店业的竞争日益激烈,提供顾客满意的服务是竞争的焦点和核心。酒店必须建立顾客导向的服务竞争意识、管理意识、管理策略。本文从酒店服务质量的特点出发,依据顾客感知服务质量形成的模式,阐明通过控制顾客感知服务质量的方式达到控制酒店服务质量的策略。本文首先论证了顾客感知服务质量是评定酒店服务质量的基本标准,然后分析了影响顾客感知服务质量的重要因素,最后阐述了对其相关因素的控制策略。     

顾客感知服务质量的价值曲线评价方法

激烈的竞争和快速的变化使许多服务和零售企业进一步寻求使其能够标新立异的获利途径。在这些企业中,与成功紧密联系的一个战略是输送高质量的服务。然而,对于服务质量的衡量及评价方法乃至如何发现使顾客感知服务质量产生质的飞跃的关键要素问题,一直困扰着理论研究者和实践开发者。本文打破传统的逻辑战略思维,从价值创新的思路出发提出了价值曲线评价方法。该方法是发现使顾客感知服务质量产生质的飞跃的关键要素的有效方法之一。文章首先论述了价值曲线评价方法的步骤,接着从五个方面论述了该方法的逻辑思路,最后提出了实施价值曲线评价方法的五个平台。     

Construire le mérite dans la fonction publique d’État : l’exemple de la Culture (1880-1980)

Merit-based procedures for evaluating and grading civil servants in the French central government have often been studied from the angle of circulations of ideas or practices between the public and private sectors or toward foreign organizations. Less attention has been given to the internal origins of procedures for assessing the work of civil servants. This article focuses on the procedures gradually worked out to evaluate civil servants in the French Ministry of Culture. Light is shed on the difficulties of keeping the Republic's promise to base merit only a difference in talent alone. How to measure a civil servant's work? Are qualifications evaluated while seeing to it that as many government employees as possible receive promotions? This focus on procedures, imagined or actually used, for grading, evaluating and promoting the personnel in museums shows that these processes follow a timing and modality that vary depending on the level in the hierarchy. The evaluation process, however, does wield ties between socio-occupational groups that all else separates. Practices for measuring the work done by these civil servants existed before the neomanagerial objection to the bureaucratic system's rules and regulations in the 1960s. The French way of evaluating merit is not simply an importation of Anglo-Saxon managerial methods.     

Improving the Utilization of Front-Line Service Delivery System Personnel*

There are two types of work typically performed in services which differ in the degree of control management has over when the work must be done. Serving customers, an activity that can occur only when customers are in the system is, by its nature, uncontrollable work. In contrast, the execution of controllable work does not require the presence of customers, and is work over which management has some degree of temporal control. This paper presents two integer programming models for optimally scheduling controllable work simultaneously with shifts. One model explicitly defines variables for the times at which controllable work may be started, while the other uses implicit modeling to reduce the number of variables. In an initial experiment of 864 test problems, the latter model yielded optimal solutions in approximately 81 percent of the time required by the former model. To evaluate the impact on customer service of having front-line employees perform controllable work, a second experiment was conducted simulating 5, 832 service delivery systems. The results show that controllable work offers a useful means of improving labor utilization. Perhaps more important, it was found that having front-line employees perform controllable work did not degrade the desired level of customer service.