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.     

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.     

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.     

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。     

基于心理契约的关系营销机制:服务业实证研究

借鉴组织行为学研究成果,本文对心理契约概念进行了界定。在关系营销研究框架基础上,加入心理契约这一变量,就心理契约与顾客信任、顾客承诺、顾客忠诚之间的关系建立了结构方程模型。通过两个服务行业的实证数据分析,基于心理契约的关系营销机制得到了验证。研究结果为营销研究和实践提供了理论指导和实证依据。     

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.     

Decision Support for Bus Operations in a Mass Transit System*

A computerized system has been developed for assigning, parking, and dispatching buses so that each operator in the St. Louis metropolitan transit system generally drives the same bus each day. Combinations of optimizing routines, mathematical heuristics, decision rules from experienced personnel, and human intervention are used to manage the bus operations efficiently. This paper describes the tools created for this task and documents significant improvements in maintenance that occurred after the system became operational.     

县级地方政府行政效能建设的突破口--以石狮市12345便民服务中心为例

在实现治理能力现代化的进程中，各地政府都在努力通过转变职能，健全机制，机构改革等方式来提高政府的行政效能。12345便民服务中心是近几年来为解决民众日常非紧急诉求的电话服务平台机构，在12345平台为民众处理诉求聆听民声，拓宽自下而上的沟通渠道的同时，也推动着政府部门自上而下的行政效能改进。文章以石狮市12345便民服务中心为案例，以12345便民服务中心这一平台为出发点，如何整合多方资源，激发部门活力，优化绩效考评，促进政民互动，进而形成对行政效能的倒逼推动作用。     

The impact of a waiting-time threshold in overflow systems with impatient customers

This paper analyzes the performance of call centers with impatient customers, two levels of support, and an overflow mechanism. Waiting calls from the front-office queue – if not reneging – are sent to the back office if at least one back-office agent is available and if a certain threshold t on the waiting time is reached. We approximate such systems via a continuous-time Markov chain that allows for overflow immediately upon arrival. Two different approaches for the derivation of the respective probability of an overflow are developed. Numerical results compare the reliability of these Markovian performance approximations for different parameter settings. The impact of the threshold t on different performance measures is shown dependent on the impatience of customers.