CAREER: Service Quality and Its Operational Impacts

本学院早期职业发展（CAREER）研究旨在解决服务质量及其业务影响的量化。质量是任何服务的一个重要方面，但由于缺乏简单的服务质量衡量标准和分析模型，质量往往难以管理。本提案将建立模型，利用称为服务分辨率的服务质量测量，以帮助管理者确定最合适的服务质量水平，以及如何实现它。本提案中解决的三个关键问题是：1）在实践中，服务公司应该如何测量其服务分辨率？2)服务解决方案对运营成本和收入有什么影响，哪些运营决策可以用来影响它？3)如何利用适当的外判合约，改善现时普遍出现的服务质素欠佳的情况？这些问题的答案将在广泛的领域，如能力规划和控制，客户关系管理和业务流程外包的应用。拟议的工作将服务于若干教育目标。首先，研究成果将为运营管理，市场营销，经济学和统计学领域做出理论贡献。二是将研究成果融入教材和新课程。第三，本提案中提出的想法将具有与实践者相关的管理见解，因此涉及与国内外行业合作伙伴的密切合作，以进行想法测试，数据收集和实施。第四，拟议中的工作还将通过校园中心的活动和少数民族学生的参与，对少数民族拥有的企业和华盛顿州经济落后地区产生广泛影响。最后，该项目将支持研究生和本科生参与拟议的项目活动。

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.