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In the previous chapter, I introduced services and explained how they are distributed using dependency injection. When using dependency injection, the objects that are used to resolve dependencies are created by service providers, known more commonly as providers. In this chapter, I explain how providers work, describe the different types of provider that are available, and demonstrate how providers can be created in different parts of the application to change the way that services behave. Table 20-1 puts providers in context.

Οι τεχνολογίες πληροφοριών και επικοινωνίας (ΤΠΕ) έφεραν επανάσταση στην παροχή υπηρεσιών. Σε αυτή την εργασία, θα εστιάσουμε την προσοχή μας στις υπηρεσίες των οποίων η παροχή υποστηρίζεται από ΤΠΕ, π.χ. μέσω της χρήσης των πληροφοριακών συστημάτων των επιχειρήσεων ή μέσω του διαδικτύου. Οι υπηρεσιοστρεφείς αρχιτεκτονικές (Service Oriented Architecture – SOA) είναι σήμερα το κυρίαρχο πρότυπο για το σχεδιασμό, την ανάπτυξη και την εφαρμογή τέτοιων πληροφοριακών συστημάτων. Παραδοσιακοί κλάδοι υπηρεσιών, όπως ο τουρισμός, η υγεία και η δημόσια διοίκηση, είναι πλέον σε θέση να παρέχουν τις υπηρεσίες τους πιο αποτελεσματικά, μέσω διαφόρων διαύλων, προσαρμοσμένων στις ανάγκες των πελατών τους. Κατά συνέπεια, ένας αυξανόμενος αριθμός υπηρεσιών παρέχεται ηλεκτρονικά μέσω του διαδικτύου, διαμορφώνοντας αυτό που αναφέρεται στη βιβλιογραφία ως διαδίκτυο των υπηρεσιών (Web of Services). Η παροχή υπηρεσιών έχει προχωρήσει αναμφίβολα σε μεγάλο βαθμό. Ωστόσο, εντοπίστηκαν δύο προβλήματα που εμποδίζουν την εξατομικευμένη παροχή υπηρεσιών προσανατολισμένων στον πελάτη, ιδίως στο πλαίσιο του διαδικτύου των υπηρεσιών: i.Την περιορισμένη συμμετοχή των πελατών, ιδιαίτερα στην μοντελοποίηση και στην περιγραφή των υπηρεσιών, και ii.Την ύπαρξη πολλών ανταγωνιστικών ή επικαλυπτόμενων προτύπων και μοντέλων για υπηρεσίες, τα οποία εντέλει δεν είναι πλήρη. Επιστήμες, όπως το μάρκετινγκ και το μάνατζμεντ, ευαγγελίζονται τη σημασία της συμμετοχής του πελάτη καθ' όλη τη διάρκεια του κύκλου ζωής των υπηρεσιών και δίνουν ιδιαίτερη σημασία στην αξιολόγηση αυτών από τους πελάτες. Παρατηρήσαμε όμως ότι οι αρχές αυτές δεν τηρούνται στην παροχή υπηρεσιών στο διαδίκτυο. Οι ερευνητές στο διαδίκτυο των υπηρεσιών υποθέτουν ότι ο πελάτης έχει συνήθως έναν παθητικό ρόλο, που περιορίζεται στην κατανάλωση των υπηρεσιών και όχι απαραίτητα και στο σχεδιασμό τους. Θεωρούν ότι η μοντελοποίηση και η περιγραφή της υπηρεσίας δημιουργείται αποκλειστικά από το πάροχο. Έτσι χάνονται ή δεν εκμεταλλεύονται επαρκώς πολύτιμες πληροφορίες, γνώμες και ανατροφοδότηση που προέρχονται από τους πελάτες. Παράλληλα, διαφορετικές προσπάθειες προτυποποίησης και μοντελοποίησης των υπηρεσιών δημιούργησαν επικαλυπτόμενα, και συχνά διαφορετικά (μη-διαλειτουργικά), μοντέλα για την περιγραφή τους, κανένα από τα οποία δεν λαμβάνει υπόψη την οπτική των πελατών. Στόχος της παρούσας εργασίας είναι να αναπτυχθεί ένα ολιστικό μοντέλο δεδομένων για την υπηρεσίας που θα συνδυάζει τόσο την οπτική του παρόχου όσο και αυτή των πελατών. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, οι στόχοι της εργασίας ήταν: . Να μελετηθεί και να αναλυθεί η έννοια της υπηρεσίας, προκειμένου να δημιουργηθεί ένα κοινό βασικό μοντέλο δεδομένων. II. Να επεκταθεί το κοινό βασικό μοντέλο δεδομένων, προκειμένου να συμπεριλάβει την μοντελοποίηση της οπτικής του πελάτη για την υπηρεσία, δηλαδή πληροφορίες σχετικά με το πώς ο πελάτης την αντιλαμβάνεται και τη βιώνει. III. Να αξιολογηθεί η πληρότητα, η χρηστικότητα και η χρησιμότητα του προαναφερθέντος μοντέλου υπηρεσιών μέσω την ανάπτυξης πιλοτικών εφαρμογών που το χρησιμοποιούν προκειμένου να ικανοποιήσουν τις απαιτήσεις αναφορικά με την αναζήτηση και την εξατομίκευση υπηρεσιών στην περιοχή εφαρμογής της δημόσιας διοίκησης. Τα βασικά θεωρητικά αποτελέσματα αυτής της εργασίας περιλαμβάνουν: 1.Το μοντέλο του κύκλου ζωής της υπηρεσίας από την οπτική του πελάτη. Απεικονίζει τη συμμετοχή των πελατών κατά τις διάφορες φάσεις μιας υπηρεσίας. Περιλαμβάνει πέντε φάσεις, ήτοι: συνειδητοποίηση αναγκών, αναζήτηση, εξατομίκευση, παροχή και αξιολόγηση υπηρεσίας. 2.Το κοινό βασικό μοντέλο δεδομένων για την υπηρεσία (Unified Service Model). Αποτελεί τον κοινό τόπο μεταξύ ενός πλήθους διαφορετικών αλλά και συχνά επικαλυπτόμενων μοντέλων τα οποία επιχειρούν την αναπαράσταση των υπηρεσιών από τη οπτική του παρόχου. 3.Το πελατοκεντρικό μοντέλο υπηρεσιών (Customer Service Model). Αποτελεί μια επέκταση του κοινού βασικού μοντέλου, προκειμένου να συμπεριλάβει την μοντελοποίηση της οπτικής του πελάτη για την υπηρεσία. Το μοντέλο εισάγει έννοιες όπως η θυσία, η προσδοκία του πελάτη, η ανατροφοδότηση και η αντιλαμβανόμενη αξία. Οι έννοιες του μοντέλου μελετώνται και οργανώνονται βάσει των οπτικών του πλαισίου Zachman. 4.Το παράδειγμα των κοινωνικών περιγραφών υπηρεσιών (social descriptions of services). Μια νέα έκφανση για την περιγραφή υπηρεσιών προερχόμενη από τον πελάτη. Οι περιγραφές αυτές εκφράζουν τις προσδοκίες και την ανατροφοδότηση των πελατών, και ενσωματώνουν πληροφορίες από την αξιολόγησή των υπηρεσιών από τους πελάτες. Οι κοινωνικές περιγραφές των υπηρεσιών συμπληρώνουν τις περιγραφές που δημιουργούνται και διατηρούνται από τους παρόχους. Οι βασικές θεωρητικές συμβολές της εργασίας συνοψίζονται στα εξής: •Συμβάλλει στην μοντελοποίηση της υπηρεσίας, η οποία εξακολουθεί να αποτελεί ένα ενεργό ερευνητικό πεδίο και ένα απαιτητικό πεδίο εφαρμογής, μέσω της ανάπτυξης ενός ολιστικού, πελατοκεντρικού μοντέλου, καλύπτοντας την μοντελοποίηση τόσο της ίδιας της υπηρεσίας όσο και του κύκλου ζωής της. •Συμβάλλει στην ικανοποίηση της απαίτησης για πελατοκεντρικές υπηρεσίες, η οποία είναι μια από τις βασικές αρχές που διέπουν το διαδίκτυο των υπηρεσιών. •Τοποθετημένη στην περιοχή της Επιστήμης των Υπηρεσιών (Service Science) συνδυάζει τη μελέτη της υπηρεσίας τόσο από την τεχνική σκοπιά (επιστήμη υπολογιστών) όσο και από την επιχειρηματική (μάρκετινγκ, μάνατζμεντ…), μεταφέροντας έτσι γνώση από το ένα πεδίο στο άλλο. •Με την εισαγωγή ενός κοινού βασικού μοντέλου για την υπηρεσία, το οποίο καλύπτει όλες τις υφιστάμενες προσπάθειες, μειώνει τα σημασιολογικά εμπόδια διαλειτουργικότητας και συμβάλλει στην σημασιολογική διασύνδεση των υπηρεσιών, καθώς και των υφιστάμενων περιγραφών τους που κατασκευάζονται χρησιμοποιώντας διαφορετικά σημασιολογικά μοντέλα.

Today"s world economy is becoming more of service oriented. This situation can be attributed to the increased importance and significance being witnessed in the service industry by both the developed and the developing economies of the world. In fact, growth in the service sector is often used as an indicator to measure a country"s economic growth. The service industry has since become the main stay of the economy of many nations. The service industry offers services to customers. These customers often expect value for their money. Customer satisfaction is of equal importance in the service industry just like in the product related business. Three forces dominate the prevailing marketing environment in the service sector increasing competition from private players, changing and improving technologies and continuous shifts in the regulatory environment, which has led to the growing customer sophistication. Customers have become more and more aware of their requirements and demand higher standards of services. Their perceptions and expectations are continually evolving, making it difficult for the service providers to measure and manage services effectively. The key lies in improving the service selectively, paying attention to more critical service attributes/dimensions as a part of customer service management. It is an imperative to understand how sensitive the customers are to various service attributes or dimensions. Allocating resources in the fashion that is consistent with customer priorities can enhance the effectiveness in the service operations. In addition, customer service attribute priorities need to be fully explored in service specific contexts. This paper is an attempt to explore relative importance of service quality dimensions across a "select" service context.

QoS-aware service selection seeks to find the optimal service providers to achieve the optimization goal of a service requester, such as the maximization of utility, while satisfying global QoS requirements. Service providers are usually self-interested and have some private information, such as minimum prices, that would significantly factor into the decision making of the service requester. Thus, service requesters face a decision making dilemma with incomplete information. Recent work has used iterative combinatorial auctions to address this problem. However, such studies do not sufficiently consider that the service requester can elicit the private information from service providers by observing their actions. This can help the service selection process achieve better outcomes. In this paper, we propose a type of incentive contract that can motivate the service providers to offer the QoS and prices that the service requester prefers. Based on the incentive contracts, we propose an incentive mechanism for effective service selection. In the mechanism, a service requester offers a set of incentive contracts to the service providers and then elicits their private information based on their responses to the incentive contracts. The process is iterated until the service requester finally obtains a solution that fulfills the global QoS requirements. Experimental results show that the incentive contracts have a positive impact on both service requesters and providers and that the incentive mechanism outperforms the existing combinatorial auction-based approaches in finding optimal solutions.

As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant messages. This encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to explore service differentiations so as to optimize their profits and allocation of network resources. Much prior work has focused on the viability of network service differentiation by comparing with the case of a single-class service. However, the optimal service differentiation for an ISP subject to resource constraints has remained unsolved. In this work, we establish an optimal control framework to derive the analytical solution to an ISP's optimal service differentiation, i.e., the optimal service qualities and associated prices. By analyzing the structures of the solution, we reveal how an ISP should adjust the service qualities and prices in order to meet varying capacity constraints and users' characteristics. We also obtain the conditions under which ISPs have strong incentives to implement service differentiation and whether regulators should encourage such practices.

Cloud modelling languages (CMLs) are designed to assist customers in tackling the diversity of services in the cloud market. While many CMLs have been proposed in the literature, they lack practical support for automating the selection of services based on the specific service level objectives of a customer's application. We put forward SLO-ML, a novel and generative CML to capture service level requirements and, subsequently, to select the services to honour customer requirements and generate the deployment code appropriate to these services. We present the architectural design of SLO-ML and the associated broker that realises the deployment operations. We rigorously evaluate SLO-ML using a mixed methods approach. First, we exploit an experimental case study with a group of researchers and developers using a real-world cloud application. We also assess overheads through an exhaustive set of empirical scalability tests. Through expressing the levels of gained productivity and experienced usability, we highlight SLO-ML's profound potential in enabling user-centric cloud brokers. We also discuss limitations as application requirements grow.

Web service is a functionality which is accessed through the internet. Different service providers offer same functionality which has increased the efficiency of service to a great amount.The customers have to access by selecting web services.The goal is to find the appropriate web services that fulfill the customer requirements. Service selection is the process of selecting the most suitable service from the list of discovered services. This process is usually based on the metrics like Quality of Services(QoS) and are ranked based on the QoS values using four service selection techniques namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Logic Scoring Preference (LSP), Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (Fuzzy Topsis) and Web service relevancy factor (WsRF). Inappropriate service selection leads to many complications which in turn require an evaluation scheme for adopting a distinct method. The performance evaluation of the service selection methods is carried out using analysis of variance (ANOVA). To improve the performance of service selection, the Iterative MapReduce is used. This reduces the execution time of the each selection process by running the process parallel.

When a single service on its own cannot fulfill a sophisticated application, a composition of services is required. Existing methods mostly use a fixed-price scheme for service pricing and determine service allocation for composition based on a first-price auction. However, in a dynamic service market, it is difficult for service providers to determine a fixed price that is profitable while attractive to customers. Meanwhile, this mechanism cannot ensure that the providers who require the least cost to provide services would win the auction, because the pricing strategy of service providers is unpredictable. To address such issues, in this paper, we propose Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction-based dynamic pricing for a generalized service composition. We consider fine-grained services as candidates for composition as well as coarse-grained ones. In our approach, service providers bid for services of different granularities in the composite service and based on received bids, a user decides a composition that minimizes the social cost while meeting quality constraints. Experimental results at last verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Note to Practitioners —Motivated by the popular auction-based dynamic pricing in the modern Internet business, this paper proposes a Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction-based approach for multigranularity service composition in order to overcome the shortcomings of existing approaches, e.g., unpredictability in service pricing, and lack of economic efficiency. The proposed approach instantiates a composite service in an economically efficient way and it offers service providers with the incentives to honestly declare the true costs of their concrete services in the bids. In the experiments, compared with fine-grained service composition, the proposed approach reduces the social cost and user payment of service composition by 6.8% and 11.2% on average, respectively, and it also shows superiority over the first-price auction-based approach.

Workforce staffing and assignment decisions are of critical importance for meeting the challenge of minimizing operational costs while providing satisfactory customer service. These decisions are particularly challenging for omnichannel service centers, where customers can request services via different communication channels (e.g., phone, e-mail, live-chat, social media) that have different service quality and response requirements. We present a formulation of the omnichannel workforce management problem that accounts for variations in response urgencies of different channels as well as diminishing agent performances due to channel switching. We develop an algorithm that efficiently provides solutions for this problem and determines the number and channel allocation of service agents within the service center. Through numerical experiments, we study the performance of the algorithm among various service center configurations with equal cost characteristics. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can identify service center structures that outperform many alternative structures, including those commonly-adopted in the real-world.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between technical and social systems within an organization that potentially affect the service experience, as perceived by end customers. Design/methodology/approach The paper explores the potential impact of an integrated service quality system on the service experience. A conceptual model is presented, accompanied by a detailed development of the hypotheses. Two samples (Study 1: n=474, Study 2: n=225) of consumers are used to empirically test the proposed model. Findings The analysis reveals the impact a technical system has on employees’ inherent abilities (i.e. the social system), which, in turn, affect the overall assessment by customers. Additionally, the situation in which an employee works (i.e. operating environmental conditions) results in differences in the model. Research limitations/implications This paper’s main implication is this paper employs established theory to develop a model that is empirically tested to show that implementing and maintaining a quality-oriented service system can positively influence the overall customer experience. The limitations are based primarily on the methodology in which individual employees assessed all aspects of both the social and technical systems. Practical implications Managers should be diligent in their design and implementation of the quality components as these affect the work setting in which employees operate. Originality/value Prior research has neither explored an integrated service quality system’s impact on the service experience nor employed an established theoretical framework. This work accomplishes both with the results providing contributions to both theory and practice.

Service Reporting is an essential part of Service Level Management (SLM) in IT Service Management (ITSM). These SLM reports show Service Quality status in compare to Service Level Target (SLT) based on Service Level Agreement (SLA). However, producing Technical Service Reports (TSRs) for SLM has Data Quality (DQ) challenges when IT services of a large enterprise are outsourced to a large IT service provider (ITSP). In fact, sources of technical metrics in these reports are coming from huge, unverified and non-normalized system-generated events and logs in a large enterprise environment. In addition, there are lacks of configuration items and service information meta-data that are essential for producing these SLM reports. These challenges lead to low intrinsic and contextual DQ of reports that destroy customer’s trust and management visibility which lead to Service Quality (SQ) issues and financial penalties. This research used Action Design Research (ADR) methodology and insider participant observation, focus group, interview and questionnaire data gathering and content analysis. Design, actions and data collection are done in and from a Multi-National Company (MNC) in Malaysia that provides IT services to one of the top 10 biggest enterprises in the world, during 4 years of research. The research implemented artifact is an integrated reporting system. It used Feedback Control System (FCS) theory and ITSM concepts to create Reports Data Quality Improvement Loop (RDQIL) to improve TSRs’ DQ. The research output is an ensemble artifact which formalized in the class of problems, class of solutions and set of design principles that consist of new Hybrid Normalize Data Warehouse (HNDW) architecture and Integrated Feedback Control Reporting (IFCR) process model. The importance of research emerges by improving SQ and reducing the risks of financial penalties by providing complex event processing and service reporting integrated into Operation processes. The research’s design principles and IFCR process model create RDQIL that improves TSRs’ DQ in large ITSPs which lead SQ improvement and prevent financial penalties.

Service quality is a critical element for fashion boutique operations. However, owing to limitation of resources, fashion boutiques usually cannot afford to establish a very formal service quality management system. Motivated by the importance of service management for fashion boutiques, this paper examines the respective service quality issues in two related parts: based on the revised retail service quality scale (RSQS) model, the first part conducts a service gap analysis via an empirical survey. It is found that the RSQS model is valid, the respective service gaps exist, and the problem-solving dimension has the largest service gap. Focusing on this most significant problem-solving service gap (PSSG) identified in the empirical analysis, the second part analytically studies the optimal PSSG decision for fashion boutiques and examines the impact of retail competition via a game theoretic analysis. The closed-form analytical findings reveal several insights, such as: 1) for both monopoly and homogeneous duopoly cases, the equilibrium demands depend solely on the profit margin, and the service gap enhancement efficiency and 2) the relative PSSG dependent demand sensitivity is critically important because it affects the equilibrium PSSG significantly.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In today's competitive world, service providers need to be customer-focused and proactive in their marketing strategies to create consumer awareness of their services. Cloud computing provides an open and ubiquitous computing feature in which a large random number of consumers can interact with providers and request services. In such an environment, there is a need for intelligent and efficient methods that increase confidence in the successful achievement of business requirements. One such method is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is comprised of service objectives, business terms, service relations, obligations and the possible action to be taken in the case of SLA violation. Most of the emphasis in the literature has, until now, been on the formation of meaningful SLAs by service consumers, through which their requirements will be met. However, in an increasingly competitive market based on the cloud environment, service providers too need a framework that will form a viable SLA, predict possible SLA violations before they occur, and generate early warning alarms that flag a potential lack of resources. This is because when a provider and a consumer commit to an SLA, the service provider is bound to reserve the agreed amount of resources for the entire period of that agreement – whether the consumer uses them or not. It is therefore very important for cloud providers to accurately predict the likely resource usage for a particular consumer and to formulate an appropriate SLA before finalizing an agreement. This problem is more important for a small to medium cloud service provider which has limited resources that must be utilized in the best possible way to generate maximum revenue. A viable SLA in cloud computing is one that intelligently helps the service provider to determine the amount of resources to offer to a requesting consumer, and there are number of studies on SLA management in the literature. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a comprehensive overview of existing state-of-the-art SLA management approaches in cloud computing, and their features and shortcomings in creating viable SLAs from the service provider's viewpoint. From a thorough analysis, we observe that the lack of a viable SLA management framework renders a service provider unable to make wise decisions in forming an SLA, which could lead to service violations and violation penalties. To fill this gap, our second contribution is the proposal of the Optimized Personalized Viable SLA (OPV-SLA) framework which assists a service provider to form a viable SLA and start managing SLA violation before an SLA is formed and executed. The framework also assists a service provider to make an optimal decision in service formation and allocate the appropriate amount of marginal resources. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in forming viable SLAs through experiments. From the evaluative results, we observe that our framework helps a service provider to form viable SLAs and later to manage them to effectively minimize possible service violation and penalties.

The development of information and communication technology has improved the stability in wireless network services at various levels. The services provided can be accessed by the network users through a variety of devices like Mobile phones, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and communication media. The quality of service in wireless network highly depends on various factors like service availability, data availability, throughput and latency. Many approaches were introduced earlier for location-based services, but still, there are hurdles in data management, service selection, and other QoS metrics. It is necessary to develop an optimized location based service selection approach using multi attribute data estimation (MADE) technique. In that intention, the service requested by the user is identified with similar service. Upon identifying the service, the set of supporting services which are necessary to complete the request are recognized. Based on the services’ necessity, user location and service availability, the service availability measure (SAM) is computed based on the selected service point. By selecting the service according to their SAM value, the service selection efficiency can be improved. The selection of service point is performed as per the data availability and multi attribute data estimation technique. The MADE approach enables to collect the data requested and the data sensor which possess the data. Further, it facilitates the data depth of each sensor. Based on these contents, a service support score is computed by SAM, MADE to select a single service point. The proposed algorithm improves the performance in service selection and increases the quality of service parameters.

As emerging markets have been playing more and more important roles in the global outsourcing markets, many companies from industrialized countries started to outsource various complex business processes oversea intending to take advantage of talented workforce at low cost. In this study, we focus on the challenging aspects and identify complex relationships that exist in the professional service outsourcing context from the service provider's perspective. Building on information processing theory, this paper aims to explain how task characteristics affect performance differently through a service provider's customer orientation and client integration. The unbalanced effects identified in this study influence the service provider's performance contradictorily and largely contribute to those unsatisfied results in professional service outsourcing. Using survey data from 192 Indian professional service providers, we find that both service provider's customer orientation and client integration are positively associated with its performance, while the impacts of two task characteristics (complexity and security) on customer orientation and client integration are in opposite direction. The unbalanced effects raise challenges in properly managing tasks to enhance performance. This study contributes to the much-needed efforts in the study of professional service outsourcing, a new and fast growing cross-border professional service activity. Managerial implications are also drawn from our study to practicing global clients and offshore service providers on how to successfully manage inter-organizational relations in outsourcing process to achieve expected benefits.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of an additional service on existing consumers’ usage of existing services from the same service provider. Research has often focused on marketers’ efforts to sell new offerings to existing customers. However, does the consumption of these new offerings by existing customers affect their usage of the firm’s existing services? This research examines this question in the context of a subscription service. Design/methodology/approach This study uses matched consumer- and firm-level data from a leading telecom service provider in India. These data include responses from 230 consumers, as well as details on their usage of existing and additional services. The data are analyzed using three-stage least squares regressions while controlling for consumers’ past usage of the existing services. Findings The results indicate that existing consumers’ cross-buying of the new service results in a reduction of their future usage of existing services. Most consumers also managed to maintain their monthly payments constant, even though they had subscribed to the new service. Together, these findings imply that consumers reallocate their budget by reducing their usage of existing services to accommodate the usage of an additional service from the same service provider. Consequently, the revenue of the firm might not always increase when the consumer cross-buys an additional service from the firm. Originality/value Marketing research on cross-buying has so far neglected to look at the effects of existing consumers’ adoption of an additional service on existing services of the service provider. This study focused on this gap in knowledge, in the context of subscription services. Using consumers’ perceptions and matched service usage data, the authors extend the literature that tries to understand why cross-buying may not be beneficial to the firm in certain service settings.

This paper studies a dual-channel supply chain composed of a manufacturer and a retailer. The manufacturer and the retailer sell homogeneous durable goods bundled with warranty service that is prov...

A service provider/retailer offers ancillary service (e.g., shipping by an online retailer) to two types of customers, impatient and patient, who may be heterogeneous both in their delay sensitivities and service valuations. She can use prioritization and/or strategic delay to differentiate them by offering two service classes and charging different prices, potentially resulting in a split in which a single customer type selects both the classes. Her objective is to minimize cost while satisfying individual rationality and incentive compatibility conditions. We characterize the optimal solutions under both exogenous and endogenous capacities. We examine the conditions under which the following strategically important features of service delivery are optimal, and relate them to practical scenarios: (i) free service, (ii) single/differentiated service, (iii) split of customers, and (iv) strategic delay. We find that the presence of these features depends on (i) whether the retailer has limited or sufficient capacity and (ii) whether she sells fashion goods or staple products. A typical explanation for offering free service is that it increases demand from customers. We make an operational case for it by showing that even if demand does not change, free service is still optimal under some scenarios.

As a typical sustainable product-service system, the aero-engine overhaul service aims to recover the functionality to fulfil certain flight hours and thrust requirements. How to configure the overhaul service with various sub-services is a key issue in industry. In this paper, a use-oriented aero-engine overhaul service configuration approach is proposed with two methods: overhaul service configuration and part repair service configuration. The overhaul service configuration method decomposes the overhaul service into various sub-services and creates a hierarchical service tree model, taking the cost and energy consumption into consideration. Based on the sub-service filtering and selection rule, the bill of exchange service comes with the bill of discard service. The part repair service configuration method matches each part repair procedure service with a proper service provider. Some non-dominated bills of repair services are obtained by minimizing the repair service cost, finishing time deviation and energy consumption. Considering the multi-objective character of the overhaul service configuration problem, these two methods result in some Pareto solutions to fulfil the service requirements. Through implementing the approach as a prototype, a case study is shown to illustrate the use-oriented aero-engine overhaul service configuration approach and verify its feasibility. A bridge between the flight hours and thrust requirements and the overhaul service configuration results is built when the cost and energy consumption are minimized. The study contributes to the shift of aero-engine overhaul services from the add-on services to sustainable use-oriented product-service systems. The research is under the support of the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Program No. 2013JM7001) and the “National Natural Science Foundation of China” (NSFC, No. 50805122). This research is also supported in part by the Mistra REES (Resource Efficient and Effective Solutions) program funded by MISTRA, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (No. 2014/16) and the Circularis (Circular Economy through Innovating Design) project funded by VINNOVA, Sweden’s Innovation Agency (No. 2016-03267). The authors wish to express their deep appreciation to the practitioners involved in the case study for their support.

All too often, companies do not rigorously calculate service levels. Instead, they arbitrarily set service levels by employing a top-down mandate. They employ this arbitrary approach because they have difficulty in quantifying the economics of a specific service level; the primary difficulty these companies encounter is quantifying the cost of not satisfying demand. Intel’s Customer Fulfillment and Logistics Group has developed a data-driven approach to calculate customer service levels. The major breakthrough in this work is a simple three-step process that diverse functions across the supply chain can employ to agree on the costs associated with a given service level.

Many goods manufacturers and service providers jointly deliver partnered hybrid offerings to achieve competitive advantage and superior performance. In such cases, service providers may emphasize different aspects of service in their offerings. Do service providers and goods manufacturers benefit equally from emphasizing service satisfaction? Do the performance effects of emphases on different aspects of service satisfaction vary across different goods? The authors examine the effects of emphases on two aspects of service satisfaction, relational service (interactions with the service provider’s staff) and service environment (service provider’s facilities), on the market shares of service and goods components of partnered hybrid offerings. Using multiple secondary data sources from the U.S. automobile industry between 2009 and 2015, the authors find that emphasizing relational service satisfaction increases service market share but decreases goods market share. Counterintuitively, emphasizing ser...

Service composition is a complex task that has attracted an increasing attention. It is significant to develop an approach to evaluate the trust of a composite service so that the client can obtain a satisfactory service from a large number of services. While, the fact is that many current approaches do not consider the trust dependency between component services in a composite service. Moreover, the approaches considering it focus only on the evaluation of already implemented composite service that can provide the rating of each component service in each execution. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the global trust of a composite service. It can be used for the evaluation of unexecuted composite services. In the trust evaluation procedure, we take trust dependency and the composite service’s invocation structure into account. We use a trust dependency analysis method inspired by the static program analysis technology to obtain the trust dependency relationship between component services. A greedy algorithm is also proposed to select the optimal component services from several candidate services for a composite service with the linear time complexity. Analysis and experiments show that our proposed approaches can evaluate the trust of a composite service reasonably and discover the optimal component service efficiently.

With the cooperation between hospitals and advanced technologies such as mobile Internet, big data and cloud computing, emerging technologies and new service models have been applied in precaution, diagnosis, treatment and other medical services. As a result, people’s medical practices have been dramatically changed. On the basis of activity theory and service supply chain, the paper discusses hospital’s innovation in medical, health and care service by using cloud computing. It also explores the model and evolution of hospital’s internal activity and external supply chain.Cases in this paper from the year 2000 till now are our secondary data related to the cloud service innovation in hospitals. The study adopts textual analysis to interpret and analyze the data. Then, in-depth interviews would be taken on the basis of analytical result. Through the above-mentioned process, we find that homogeneities between different cases include treatment service cloud ranking first, community as the main promoter, substantial service innovation being emphasized, care service cloud as future trend, service innovation featured client-service model, eight procedures for service supply chain, improvement of suppliers’ self-design, and pluralism of medical care service etc. Differences of the cases include government policies versus industrial policies, multipoint distribution versus centralized organizational structure, regional institutionalization versus large-scale centralization, Substantive services application versus development of service value, market orientation versus industry orientation, service provider orientation versus service design orientation, physical customer versus invisible customer. In the end, the study offers relevant theories, management implications, and recommendations.

In the world of large-scale applications, software-as-a-service (SaaS) in general and use of micro-services, in particular, is bringing service-oriented architectures (SOA) to a new level: systems in general and systems that interact with human users (e.g., socio-technical systems) in particular are built by composing micro-services that are developed independently and operated by different parties. At the same time, SaaS applications are used more and more widely by enterprises as well as public services for providing critical services, including those processing security or privacy of relevant data. Therefore providing secure and reliable service compositions is increasingly needed to ensure the success of SaaS solutions. Building such service compositions securely, is still an unsolved problem. In this paper, we present a framework for modelling, validating, and ranking secure service compositions that integrate both automated services as well as services that interact with humans. As a unique feature, our approach for ranking services integrates validated properties (e. g., based on the result of formally analysing the source code of a service implementation) as well as contractual properties that are part of the service- level-agreement and, thus, not necessarily ensured on a technical level.

The present study aims to empirically test and evaluate the direct and indirect effects of service encounter constructs of service quality, customer satisfaction and service value on loyalty related behavioral intentions of customers in Indian Life services in India to determine the best fitting model. Most studies based on comprehensive models of service constructs relationships have not considered alternative competing models. The theoretical background and the empirical support for these issues derive mostly from prior studies in the developed markets of the U.S., UK and Canada. Further, the study aims to contribute to resolution of the variance in structure and dimensionality of service quality (dimensionality) in literature by developing and validating a second order model of service quality which integrates the two dominant perspectives ie the Nordic and the American approach. Design/methodology/approach: A second order scale of service quality was developed and validated by integrating the American and Nordic approach to Service Quality using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The constructs of Customer satisfaction, service value and Behavioural intentions were validated using confirmatory factor analysis. Two competing models of effects of the three service encounter constructs on Behavioral Intentions were tested using structural equation modeling. The results show that Service quality is a second order construct consisting of the dimensions of Core service, Service Delivery, Sales Agent Quality, Tangibles and Empathy. The process dimensions (sales Agent Quality and Service delivery) are most important in overall service quality perceptions. The effect of service quality on positive behavioural intentions is both direct and indirect with the moderating effect of service value and customer satisfaction being significant. The study contributes to research by developing and validating a hierarchical model of service quality and testing two competing models of direct and indirect effects of service quality on behavioral intentions so that there is better understanding of the simultaneous and composite interactions and effects of the three service encounter constructs. The results would provide practitioners with a valid measure of service quality in life insurance services and would enable them to devise marketing strategies which enhance customer loyalty related behavioral intentions. The study addresses the gap related to wide divergence in dimensionality and structure of service quality and contributes to the debate on whether the effect of service quality on behavioral intentions is only indirect or both direct and indirect.

The majority of existing studies on performance management in the service industry rely on the willingness of the employees to cooperate with the service standard operating procedures (SOPs) established by their supervisors. The dark side of these SOPs was not exposed until recently, when it was revealed that a high percentage of employees engage in service sabotage during service processes and that such acts may have affected customer satisfaction and damaged customer perceived value in the long term. The long-term neglect of service sabotage in organizations severely abuses the trust that customers place in organizations and reduces organizational growth and profitability. Devising the means to avoid the negative effect of service sabotage on customers is therefore crucial for organizations. In view of this, we administered a service sabotage survey to employees to gauge the frequency of individual service sabotage items and distributed another survey to customers to determine how much they care about individual service sabotage items. Based on the results, we defined a Service Sabotage Frequency Index and a Service Sabotage Concern Index, with which we constructed a Service Sabotage Management Grid (SSMG) to gauge and analyze service sabotage. The application of the SSMG can help managers in swiftly grasp the key service sabotage items in their organization, formulate improvement strategies for each individual item, reduce the potential damage that employee service sabotage may inflict on their organization, enhance operations in terms of quality and quantity, and improve competitiveness so as to achieve the goal of sustainable operations.

Co-opetition refers to the phenomenon that firms simultaneously cooperate and compete in order to maximize their profits. This paper studies the contracting for an outsourcing supply chain (a user company vs. a service provider) in the presence of co-opetition and information asymmetry. The user company outsources part of his service capacity at a discount price to the service provider for sale. The service provider charges a commission for doing outsourcing work and competes with the user company for the service capacity to satisfy their respective demands. We solve for the service provider’s optimal commission decision and the user company’s optimal outsourcing decisions (outsourcing volume and price discount) when the user company has private information about his service capacity. Specifically, we highlight the following observations. For the service provider, a menu of two-part tariffs that consist of a fixed commission and a per-volume commission can reveal the true type of the user company’s capacity; the user company’s optimal outsourcing proportion is quasi-convex and the optimal price discount is non-decreasing in his capacity volume, which is counterintuitive.

One of the greatest challenges of an enterprise's service center is to ensure that their engineers and customers are provided with the right information in a timely fashion. For this purpose, modern organizations operate a wide range of information support systems to assist customers with critical service requests and to provide proactive monitoring, where possible, to prevent service requests from occurring in the first place. It is often the case that relevant information is scattered over the Internet and/or maintained on disparate systems, buried in large amount of noisy data, and in heterogeneous formats, thereby complicating the access to reusable knowledge and extending the response time to reach a resolution. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose an effective knowledge mining solution to improve the quality of service request resolution. We model the service resolution problem as an online search and classification problem, and use domain knowledge in the form of ontology to guide effective machine learning. Our proposed solution has been extensively evaluated with experiments and has been used in a real enterprise customer center.

We study the pricing and capacity allocation problem of a service provider who serves two distinct customer classes. Customers in each class are inherently heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for service, but their utilities are also affected by the presence of other customers in the system. Specifically, customer utilities depend on how many customers are in the system at the time of service as well as who these other customers are. We find that if the service provider can price discriminate between customer classes, pricing out a class, i.e., operating an exclusive system, can sometimes be optimal and depends only on classes’ perceptions of each other. If the provider must charge a single price, an exclusive system is even more likely. We extend our analysis to a service provider who can prevent class interaction by allocating separate capacity segments to the two customer classes. Under price discrimination, allocating capacity is optimal if the “net appreciation” between classes, as defined in the paper, is negative. However, under a single-price policy, allocating capacity can be optimal even if this net appreciation is positive. We describe in detail how the nature of asymmetry in classes’ perception of each other determines the optimal strategy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2016.0606 .

Social service items are increasing with social demands so that various social welfare institutions are rapidly developing. In the educational environment, the teacher is the service provider and t...

The perceived level of public service quality and customer satisfaction may be improved by the customer-oriented behaviour of the service provider. The desired external orientation of public service provision requires marketing based modelling. In order to measure the market orientation of the municipal service provision companies and to test the casual relationships proposed by the research model the survey method is employed. The sample is analysed by confirmatory principal component analysis and relationships are tested by linear regression analysis as well as correlation analyses. According to the results of this study market orientation plays a significant role in public sector by positively influencing customer satisfaction and service quality. There is evidence that intelligence gathering by front line employees and response action elaboration play crucial roles in the service provision, which points on the importance of staff. Findings also suggest that in the municipal service provision of Hungary the market orientation is highly supported by the commitment of staff and team spirit, while market turbulence, political influence and organizational conflict have reverse impacts. The findings also show that the salient internal antecedent factor of market orientation is interdepartmental connectedness rather than top managements’ emphasis. Based on the study it is to conclude that the focus on political initiatives by the management of the public service providers generates performance loss in customers’ dimensions.

Customer service is a critical element of a hotel's strategy and an important lever for differentiation of the hotel's offer. Over the last two decades, information systems have contributed to the transformation of customer interactions, enabling an unprecedented scale and scope of service personalization in the tourism industry. This paper reports the results of a mixed method study in a hotel that offers three contributions to the development and refinement of IT-enabled service personalization theory. It explores the role of signifiers in the design of customer service systems, showing that they significantly increase customer preference elicitation during the learning phase of the service personalization process. It then demonstrates that improved preference elicitation translates into higher customer service evaluations and value perceptions of the hotel. Finally, our study shows that IT-enabled service personalization creates financial benefits for the hotel via revenue share-shift from costly intermediated to direct distribution channels.

Cloud computing is an emerging field aimed at providing any type of service on demand -anywhere, and anytime. Advances in this field have facilitated a futuristic collaborative cloud in which many inter-connected clouds provide scalable services. A request processed by an untrustworthy provider can endanger quality of service, prompting the dissatisfaction of the customer. This paper aims to select the Trustworthy Service Provider (TSP) by evaluating trust based on in-context feedback from different sources; these sources include customer feedback, global advisory feedback and third-party feedback. Furthermore, unfair feedback is filtered to improve accuracy. Consequently, the job-success rate increases, and customers are able to obtain value-for-money for the sum paid toward selection of a provider. The present experimental work proves that the proposed model is effective and efficient in selecting a trustworthy provider in a collaborative environment.

Purpose Despite increasing interest in offshoring of knowledge-intensive services, it is still undetermined as to whether the sourcing of services truly creates the anticipated value for clients. Moreover, even less is known about whether value is created for service providers in the process beyond the general service trade. This lack of knowledge is due to the challenges of capturing value creation, the unique production process of the services, and the impact of offshoring on both value creation and the production process. The purpose of this paper is to study offshored service production processes of knowledge-intensive services in order to identify direct and indirect value creation for clients as well as service providers in the process. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies a multiple case study method and studies one conglomerate with three offshored service production processes. The chosen method allows for the investigation of the service production process and indirect/direct value creation within the process. Findings The study finds that there is direct value creation for the client and the service provider towards the end of the production processes as expected. However, more importantly, it finds additional indirect value creation in various production stages. The indirect value is reflected in enhanced understanding of problems and own operations for the client and increased knowledge about clients and problem-solving approaches for the service provider. Research limitations/implications This study contributes to offshoring literature by providing a comprehensive understanding of value creation in service offshoring for clients as well as service providers. It also contributes to the service management literature as a study of direct and indirect value creation in services, particularly within the production process of the services. Practical implications The study allows practitioners to gain insights on the value creation logic of offshored services and the value created beyond that logic. More specifically, it allows client firms to gain details of various values and benefits of service offshoring and service provider firms to gain a focused perspective on value creation in their own service production that can lead to competitive advantages. Originality/value The paper is novel and original through its approach to study offshoring from a value creation logic perspective, including not only the client but also the service provider perspective. It also applies a service production process perspective that is novel in offshoring literature.

In service-oriented architecture, a web service evolves over time. Changes in a service may affect the quality of service for the service provider as well as for the service consumer. The quality of a service is measured from its structural perspective and therefore the proposed metrics are defined considering the web service description language document of a service. In this paper, a suite of metrics consisting of service evolution metric, service client-code evolution metric and service usefulness evolution metric has been proposed which measures service evolution for the service provider, impact of service evolution on the client code and on the usefulness for the service consumer. The time complexity of the proposed metrics is linear. The study of correlation between these metrics is conducted which indicates to the service provider whether the changes made in the service have tangible benefits for the consumer. To show the applicability of the metrics, real world data as well as simulated data has been used. Zuse framework has been used to theoretically validate the metrics. All the metrics are above the ordinal scale.

Waiting has been a significant concern for healthcare services. We address this issue in the context of a two-tier service system in this study. A two-tier healthcare service system consists of two different service providers, typically one public service provider and one private service provider. In a baseline model, the two service providers are modeled by two queue servers, which charge each patient a common fixed fee for the service. Then, we study a queue model in which one service provider offers a subsidy or charges a premium while the other maintains the fixed service fee. This system provides a mechanism to segment patients along their waiting time cost through price discrimination. We analyze the problem from both the perspective of minimizing total waiting cost for all patients and the perspective of maximizing social gain for the public service provider or profit for the private service provider. We show that this model can significantly alleviate the burden of waiting for patients. The study addresses the design, the efficiency, and the implementation of two-tier healthcare service systems. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this research, we discuss service value co-creation in welfare services, especially those for the disabled. A “Reciprocal Value Co-Creation Model” in which both service users and care workers in service providers create value and share in that value together is proposed. Furthermore, using a case study from L’Arche Kananoie, a care service provider for the intellectually-disabled, we will show the model in practice and show how this organization's service users and workers collaboratively create value such as “a place to belong,” “human growth,” and “a connection to society.”

In this study, the authors focus on how service providers can meet rising customer value expectations through service process designs that are not only lean but also with high service quality.

Service testing is becoming more and more important for manufacturing companies nowadays. Testing services before market launch helps to avoid mistakes and unnecessary costs. The test phase of new service development has often been neglected in business practice, but more and more its value is being fully recognised. A focus of this paper is the development of a new scientific testing approach of product-service bundles and product-service systems. The new model considers not only the service but also the product component. It is shown that there are different possibilities to combine new product and new service development – for example, products and services can be developed separately or in an interactive or integrated way – and that it is in the test phase that both components could be tested under realistic conditions before the market launch. Thereby the importance of the test phase during the development process of product-service bundle is emphasised.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, cloud service has become an indispensable component of modern information systems where quality of service (QoS) has a direct impact on the system's performance and stability. While scholars have concentrated their efforts on the monitoring and evaluation of QoS in cloud computing, other service selection characteristics have been neglected, such as the scarcity of evaluation data and various customer needs. In this paper, we present a ranking-oriented prediction method that will assist in the process of discovering the cloud service candidates that have the highest customer satisfaction. This approach encompasses two basic functions: ranking similarity estimation and cloud service ranking prediction that takes into account customer's preference and expectation. The comparative experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other competing methods.

A common practice while developing product services is to adopt procedures that could facilitate well-defined mapping of the stakeholder's requirements for the offered product services. A central theme of this research is to explore a few of those aspects which are typically not captured by traditional service development processes. This includes transition from stakeholder's needs to product services design like financial, marketing or customer relation targets and at the same level ensuring the balance between customer's satisfaction level and other stakeholder's expectations, thereby maintaining the comparative high-quality of offered services. In order to address this shortcoming in product service design, this paper proposes to employ a governance model by extending traditional service development process. Furthermore, a novel framework for industrial product service development is introduced, which consists of three process stages and takes into account the proposed governance model, along with product, process and resource models. This article also highlights some of key aspects which when considered in the governance model of our newly offered service design framework could allow service providers to tune services to optimal for individual needs.

The paper analyses its existing service blueprint along with recommends how the restaurant can enhance its quality service as well as efficiency level. Based on the semi-structured interview on the restaurant, a new service blueprint has been redesigned which limits the present and potential failure points in the existing process. High participation level from the customer along with service providers and employees will add a new value to the efficiency level of the service quality.

Since globalization has changed markets and the competitive situation, services are taking up an increasingly important role for manufacturing companies. Extending the service area accordingly offers the opportunity to develop new market potentials as well as increasing long term customer loyalty. One approach that describes this development is Service Transition and the related goods-to-services continuum on which a manufacturing company moves. But the different influences and changes in the Service Transition to the individual subareas of the After Sales Service are not considered enough. The study presented in this paper shows that the effects of the changes caused by the Service Transition to the subareas of the After Sales Service vary widely. Future models dealing with the Service Transition of manufacturing companies should take these results into account. This is an appropriate way to develop and implement effective measures for the management of the Service Transition of manufacturing companies.

A large and rapidly increasing number of services are offered through the Internet, in the cloud. This enables users to utilize services remotely, without even knowing the service provider. However, before putting their trust in a provider, users need to be able to evaluate how trustworthy a service is. This can be a daunting task, as many factors need to be considered and analyzed. The current paper aims at helping the selection of a service provider by presenting a taxonomy of trust factors and outlining its application in practical scenarios. A brief description of a framework built on this taxonomy is also given.