Service researcher support the necessity of integrating policy and design dimensions with service front-line variables in modeling service systems. Current research unveils multiple causes of good and poor service quality as well as the goal that service design for quality should attain. The goal is to neither to narrow nor to close, but to reverse the gaps among customer expectations and perception of service quality. Grounded on the contributions of conceptual and empirical research, a small three sector system dynamics model describes the interactions of policy and service front-line variables in a typical quasi-manufacturing service. The firm treats customers defections as measurable scrap and, in a company-wide effort to ferret out weaknesses against potential loss, its top management is committed to soliciting feedback from defecting customers. Computed decision scenarios trace the patterns experienced with performance to the inauspicious effects of pulling on internal policy levers too hard. The resulting dysfunctional behavior shocks the entire service system, including customers, defectors and profit per customer. A radical change in the firm’s average customer life (avgLife) target triggers a cycling-doubling pattern in the call soliciting feedback from defecting customers. This chaotic pattern forces the entire system to respond accordingly. System dynamics can provide the integrated-process view required for understanding self-inflicted problems in services. Along with its policy analysis and service design implications, the simulation output indicates the morphology of the topology possibly underlying customer perceptions of service quality.

This is the whole item.

Date created

• 1993

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
  Contact Us for questions or additional rights.

ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

d52b7bb9c69ffcb6558a9eb830eec657

Scope and Contents

Part of

f5ad87bb3e8247e3540ac1e44c6717f5

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

Scope and Contents

Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives