CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.2 Research Question and the Significance
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cyber-physical systems to dynamically detect and realize the states of customer context as the fundamental infrastructure on which our expectation-based mechanism for dispatching appropriate service experiences can be built. For simplicity, we also name the services deployed on top of the CPS infrastructure as cyber-physical services for a user‟s interactions involving both the cyber/digital space as well as the physical space. This study, hence, attempts to deliver better cyber-physical service experiences through a systematical, quantitative, and expectation-based mechanism.
Furthermore, the exhibition is an extremely dynamic and bounded environment since customer behaviors can‟t be easily predicted and controlled in real time. The mechanism is to immediately and dynamically dispatch quality service experiences to customers based on customer expectation and service operation management within the real world. Accordingly, this research also employs the exhibition context to illustrate the aforementioned mechanism.
As mentioned earlier, to build an appropriate surrounding of service experience delivery by designing service operations and creating innovative services is extremely critical. On the other hand, understanding customer mental state can also help service providers meet their needs and achieve customer satisfaction. Consequently, this research tries to analyze the relations among possible factors during service experience delivery. The research questions of this study attempts to explorer is briefed in next subsection.
1.2 Research Question and the Significance
As was discussed, previous research emphasized the importance of customer service experiences and the critical factors of service experience delivery. Since service experience delivery is a complicated and dynamic process, service providers should carefully consider the related influences embedded in services that can directly
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affect customer perception and behavior, especially in the real time and changeable situations. However, service providers may not have sufficient resources and capabilities to deal with the difficulty of service experience delivery dynamically. In addition, customer expectation, customer emotion and service operations have been an important element to influence the achievement of appropriate service experience delivery. Nevertheless, the approach of combining above considerations with service experience delivery should be plainly defined.
In order to proffer solutions for above perplexities, this study aims to propose a systematical and integrative approach of expectation-based experience and operation design and management (as defined in Definition 1-1) to resolve aforementioned problems. Consequently, this study concludes aforementioned problems to addresses two main research questions:
(1) How do service providers provide customers with satisfactory service experiences through managing customer expectation, service operation and customer emotion within cyber-physical service contexts?
The purpose of service providers is to obtain customer loyalty and business profit.
The critical approach to achieve custom loyalty and get business profit for service providers is to satisfy their customers, even in the dynamic service environments such as the cyber-physical service contexts. It is a tough task for service providers to offer satisfactory service experiences to customers in this kind of environments and contexts. As follows are the related issues to explore:
I. The influence of cyber-physical service operation management
Even though the issue of service operation has been discussed across many disciplines, most previous research only focused on the physical settings to build a good environment during service experience delivery. However,
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while considering IT-enabled services as a service system, the cyber service operation must be taken into account. Accordingly, this study still tries to find out key elements of design strategies for cyber-physical service operation. Besides, service providers should consider the performance of service operation design strategies to implement in practice. Consequently, this study would like to ascertain and find possible approaches to evaluate the effects of service operation designing strategies, especially in service experience environment.
II. The feasibility of customer expectation management and measurement Since high-quality service experiences are affected directly by customer expectation, establishing a feasible approach to effectively manage customer expectation is extremely important, especially in real time dynamic service environments. In addition, measuring customer expectation is necessary for service providers to realize customer mental status before managing customer expectations. Hence, this study aims to examine the feasibility of customer expectation management and measurement.
III. The relationship between customer expectation, emotion and satisfaction As mentioned earlier, understanding customer mental state is an essential way to design and deliver appropriate services in order to achieve customer satisfaction. However, customer expectation and emotion are two important mental factors to influence their perceptions and behaviors while receiving service experiences. Hence, the roles of customer expectation and emotion should be further analyzed and explored for designing high-quality service experiences.
(2) How can the stakeholders build a high-performance service ecosystem via
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information technology and apply this innovative idea into proper domains?
Not only service providers but also customers are the key stakeholders within the dynamic service context. Service providers are to offer useful services to serve customers and deal with customers‟ problems. Customers nowadays are playing an active role to perform the value co-creation activities. Hence, the dynamic service context can be considered as a service ecosystem and how service providers and customers can reach their purposes respectively are interesting and important to understand. As follows are the related issues to explore:
I. The role of information technology
Service experience delivery can be considered as a complex and diverse service system which includes providers, customers, employees, service environments, service cyber-physical services, and information technology.
Hence, information technology plays a critical role in order to aid service providers to deliver service experiences effectively and efficiently in the dynamic service contexts. However, what kind of information technology can be employed to assist service providers to deliver the services in the dynamic context to enable quality service experience delivery? This is an important issue to explore further.
II. A prominent methodology for a high-performance service ecosystem In order to deliver high-quality service experiences to customers, building a high-performance cyber-physical service system is necessary. However, developing a service system should have many considerations of aforementioned issues and problems. Besides, there is no complete and theoretical methodology for an expectation-based experiences and operations design and management mechanism. This research attempts to
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propose a prominent methodology to develop a high-performance cyber-physical service system.
III. The effect of technology spillover
After proposing an innovative methodology of a high-performance cyber-physical service system, it is necessary to implement the ideas to the real world in practice. Although the proposed methodology is grounded with fundamental theories and literatures, to contribute to the businesses, the methodology is expected to help service providers not only get actual responses to improve their service operations from the real data but also deliver high-quality service experiences to customers and co-create values with them.