CAREER: Service Quality and Its Operational Impacts

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research aims to address the quantification of service quality and its operational impact. Quality is an important aspect of any service, but it is often hard to manage due to a lack of simple service quality measures and analytical models. This proposal will build models that utilize a service quality measure called service resolution to help managers to determine the most appropriate service quality level and how to achieve it. Three key questions addressed in this proposal are: 1) In practice, how should a service firm go about measuring its service resolution? 2) What's the impact of service resolution on operating cost and revenue, and what operational decisions can be used to influence it? 3) How can proper outsourcing contracts be used to improve poor service quality commonly experienced nowadays? Answers to these questions will have applications in a broad range of areas such as capacity planning and control, customer relationship management, and business process outsourcing. The proposed work will serve a number of educational goals. First, research results will generate theoretical contributions to the areas of operations management, marketing, economics, and statistics. Second, research results will be integrated into teaching materials and new courses. Third, ideas developed in this proposal will have managerial insights relevant to practitioners, and therefore involves close collaboration with industry partners both domestic and international for idea testing, data collection, and implementation. Fourth, the proposed work will also have broad impacts on the minority-owned businesses and economically disadvantaged areas of Washington State through the activities of an on-campus center and involvement of minority students. Finally, the project will support both graduate and undergraduate students in the proposed project activities.