Scott E. Sampson

New service development: areas for exploitation and exploration

Abstract The management of new service development (NSD) has become an important competitive concern in many service industries. However, NSD remains among the least studied and understood topics in the service management literature. As a result, our current understanding of the critical resources and activities to develop new services is inadequate given NSD’s importance as a service competitiveness driver. Until recently, the generally accepted principle behind NSD was that “new services happen” rather than occurring through formal development processes. Recent efforts to address this debate have been inconclusive. Thus, additional research is needed to validate or discredit the belief that new services happen as a result of intuition, flair, and luck. Relying upon the general distinctions between research exploitation and exploration, this paper describes areas in NSD research that deserve further leveraging and refinement (i.e. exploitation) and identifies areas requiring discovery or new study (i.e. exploration). We discuss the critical substantive and research design issues facing NSD scholars such as defining new services, choice in focusing on the NSD process or performance (or both), and specification of unit of analysis. We also examine what can be exploited from the study of new product development to further understanding of NSD. Finally, we explore one important area for future NSD research exploration: the impact of the Internet on the design and development of services. We offer research opportunities and research challenges in the study of NSD throughout the paper.

Customer‐supplier duality and bidirectional supply chains in service organizations

Supply chains are quite easy to define for manufacturing organizations where each participant in the chain receives inputs from a set of suppliers, processes those inputs, and delivers them to a distinct set of customers. With service organizations, one of the primary suppliers of process inputs is customers themselves, who provide their bodies, minds, belongings, or information as inputs to the service processes. We refer to this concept of customers being suppliers as “customer‐supplier duality.” The duality implies that service supply chains are bidirectional, which is that production flows in both directions. This article explores the customer‐supplier duality as it pertains to supply chain management, including practical and managerial implications.

The Performance-Importance Response Function: Observations and Implications

Services and products possess various attributes, some being more important than others. Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is a technique for prioritising attributes based on measurements of performance and importance. A weakness of IPA is that it conceptualises attribute importance as a scalar which is independent of attribute performance. In this article we theorise that importance is not adequately represented as a point estimate, but is a function of performance. When attribute performance changes, importance does also, which can change the relative priority of subsequent improvement efforts. Empirical results are presented which support our theory, The nature of the performance-importance response function is discussed, along with implications. Ideas for future research are also discussed, including application of the findings to quality modelling (SERVQUAL) and other decision support methodologies (Quality Function Deployment and the Analytic Hierarchy Process).

The impact of customer contact on environmental initiatives for service firms

The impact of business operations on the natural environment has been a public concern for decades and a research concern for years. To date, the focus of environmental impact research has been almost exclusively on manufacturing industries. Environmental research specific to service industries have been neglected, despite the fact that economies of developed nations are mostly made up of service businesses. This paper explores potential distinctions of service businesses as they may influence management motivation for taking environmentally friendly actions. Through a number of case studies, we observe some commonality of environmental motivations between service and manufacturing industries, as well as some environmental themes unique to services. These themes pertain to customer awareness of environmental initiatives of service firms by virtue of their involvement in the production process. Interestingly, customer involvement can have an adverse affect on environmental initiatives.

Visualizing Service Operations

Service operations management (SOM) has a rich history of important but not widely recognized contributions to research and practice. There also seems to be some uncertainty about how SOM fits in the broader fields of operations management and service management. This article addresses those concerns by introducing a visual framework called Process-Chain-Network (PCN) Analysis. The framework is built upon PCN Diagrams that depict processes and interactions involving networks of entities. PCN Analysis includes identifying the value proposition of a given process network, assessing performance characteristics and value propositions of a process configuration, and identifying opportunities for process improvement and innovation. The PCN framework clarifies fundamental concepts of SOM, demonstrates how SOM fits in broader contexts of business management, illuminates managerial insights of SOM and related disciplines, and provides a basis for future SOM research.

Gathering customer feedback via the Internet: instruments and prospects

For many years companies have collected feedback from customers through means such as comment cards and toll‐free telephone numbers. The feedback data can be used by companies to track quality, locate quality problems, and identify suggestions for improvement. Gathering feedback from customers has become a recent but prevalent phenomenon on the Internet. Many companies designate an e‐mail address for submitting comments and questions. Companies with information on the World Wide Web frequently include a feedback form that customers can complete on screen and send at the click of a mouse. This article considers current practice and the potential for customer feedback collection over the Internet. The nature of Web‐based feedback forms is compared to corresponding features of conventional (paper) comment cards. Explanations for differences are supposed, and future prospects for Web‐based feedback are discussed.

The Unified Service Theory

This chapter discusses a Unified Service Theory (UST) that has been set forth as a foundational paradigm for Service Operations, Service Management, and now Service Science . The fundamental purpose of the UST is to unify the various phenomena we call “services” (i.e., service processes) in a way that demonstrates both how they are distinct from non-services and how they share common managerial principles. The UST prescribes boundaries for Service Science and reveals a gamut of service topics of interest to designers, managers, and researchers. Although the UST has its origins from a business operations perspective, it draws a common thread between the various perspectives pertaining to service.

An Empirically Defined Framework for Designing Customer Feedback Systems

© 1999, ASQ It may seem obvious that companies should require a return on investments in customer feedback systems. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback costs time and money, but often the return or impact on the bottom line is not clear. This study discusses the customer feedback investment, and presents a framework for utilizing customer feedback to advance quality at various parts of an organization—consistent with the total quality management idea. The framework begins by identifying goals and objectives for customer feedback systems, which lead to issues of instrument design, feedback solicitation methods, and data analysis and use. Within the framework, illustrations are presented from an extensive field study of feedback instruments in actual use. This study is intended to serve as a reference to managers and students of management interested in developing customer feedback systems that make a definite contribution to quality management efforts.

OR PRACTICE—Optimization of Vacation Timeshare Scheduling

This paper reports on an application of network-flow integer programming to a vacation timeshare exchange problem. A typical timeshare owner has purchased yearly access to a specific week at a specific resort. The resulting lack of vacation variety is mitigated by systems that allow owners to exchange owned weeks for different weeks at different resorts according to their preferences, the assessed value of what they are exchanging, their contractual priority, and resort availability. The timeshare exchange problem is similar to other preference-based assignment problems such as labor scheduling, preferential bidding, and traditional timetabling, but different in the formulation of the objective function. This paper demonstrates how the effectiveness of timeshare exchange processes can be improved through mathematical optimization, as measured by increased satisfaction of participant preferences. Optimization also presents exchange managers with the opportunity to more precisely manage preference and priority trade-offs among various classes of participants. The trade-off decisions are aided by sensitivity analysis utilizing a minmax criterion.

Modes of customer co-production for international service offerings

Purpose – Much has been written about the manifestations and managerial implications of customer co-production in service offerings. However, there have been relatively few references to issues of co-production in international service environments. Co-production is very relevant in international environments because of the requirements for interaction between producers and consumers, which interaction spans international borders and national cultures. The purpose of this paper is to apply an established theory of co-production, the Unified Service Theory (UST), to the international service context. This provides the authors with structured models for conceptualizing the co-productive nature of international service offerings and assessing-related managerial implications. Design/methodology/approach – The UST provides a model of co-productive service delivery. Extending that model, the authors develop a taxonomy of international service based on the “four modes of service supply” provided in the General A...