Implications

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立 政 治 大 學

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9.2 Implications

This research not only addressed the complete details of the systematical, quantitative and expectation-based mechanism to design and manage service experience and operation but also gave some simulation results as the preliminary evidences of implementing the proposed mechanism. Furthermore, we also applied the proposed mechanism into a real case in the exhibition and gather customer data in order to demonstrate the theoretical concept. Hence, this study concludes the ideas of the proposed mechanism and important findings by providing several managerial and academic implications as follows.

9.2.1 Managerial Implications

(1) Realizing the notion of customer expectation management during service experiences delivery.

Customer expectation has been an important factor to influence customers to perceive service experiences across many disciplines. Most service firms and researchers have to utilize the survey method with questionnaires to investigate what customers expect after they have finished experiencing or purchasing service experiences. Hence, the collected data could have a bias that can‟t reflect actual customer expectation in that moment of perceiving service experiences. Furthermore, it is tough to measure customer expectation while they are in the dynamic and real time surroundings. How to capture the customer expectation, thus, has been a difficult issue, especially for calculating the customer expectation. This research proposed a customer expectation measurement model to quantity customer expectation that enables service providers to simply and efficiently realize what customers expect.

Meanwhile, the study also established a cyber-physical service system which can help service providers deliver and design high-quality service experiences to customers

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立 政 治 大 學

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l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

~ 191 ~

based on the different strategies of customer expectation management. Service providers can dynamically and immediately manage customer expectation in a real time service experience environment. Consequently, service providers can save a lot of time and efforts to implement the notion of customer expectation management through the proposed mechanism and system.

(2) Achieving satisfactory customer service experiences by effectively managing customer expectations and emotions in service contexts.

To achieve long-term customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal for service firms.

This research gives service providers a fundamental clue to further extend the notion of customer expectation management for building a complicated and integrated system considering customer mental status (e.g. customer emotion or customer intention) in order for customer satisfaction. When service providers offer more suitable services to influence customers by using expectation determinants, customers who generate appropriate expectations can perceive the benefits through the delivery of proper services and get satisfaction. In other words, service providers can define different expectation management strategies to not only attract repeated and potential customers but also increase their competitions in the market. Meanwhile, although we have known service operation management is a important way to build an atmospheric service environment to enable customers to have positive emotions, good customer expectation management also results in the higher positive customer emotion. For high customer emotions, service providers have different strategic decisions to strengthen the considerations of either service operations or customer expectations according to different situations (such as customer types, timing, resource arrangement, or business purposes).

(3) Co-creating a service experience ecosystem for maximizing values and

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立 政 治 大 學

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Pullman and Gross (2004) noted that service providers can increase customer loyalty to get high profit through developing their high ability of service experience design. Thus, how to provide customers with good service experiences has been also a vital issue in the academia and the business field. As mentioned earlier, there are many key issues (such as service operation, or customer emotion) correlating to the topic of service experiences. Service providers always have to pay more attention to service operation arrangement for delivering and designing service experiences by estimating service materials, stuff or customer preference based on their past experiences that could result in additional efforts and cost. Meanwhile, service providers may not satisfy customers without delivering expected service experiences.

This study is to propose a systematical, quantitative and expectation-based mechanism for service experience and operation design and management. While service providers do create service experience activities that customers can be involved, customers can co-create service experience values with service providers and other customers. Thus, customers receive expected service experiences that can result in high customer satisfaction and repeated customers. On the other hand, by using the systematical and integrative approach, service providers can successfully make use of existing resources, equipments and employees for better service operation management to dispatch satisfactory service experiences. Service providers can also deduce the additional efforts and cost and match customer expectation by the proposed mechanism. Hence, service providers can attract more repeated customers to increase the service profits. This proposed mechanism helps service providers not only decrease the cost and efforts of service operation management but also increase the values and profit with customers within the service experience ecosystem.

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立 政 治 大 學

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N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

~ 193 ~

(4) Duplicating an innovative and novel technique to different domains for reaching high business benefits and competitive market position.

In the era of globalization, businesses have to face a lot of challenges from customers and competitors, so they invest a lot of time and money in developing innovative and novel techniques to resolve customer problems and satisfy customer needs. The best way for these innovative and novel techniques is to export or apply into suitable industries or domains rather than only for either one industry or one company. How to maximize the values of these innovative and novel approaches is very important for businesses to take into account, especially for service firms.

Service firms should be based on the characteristics of service-dominant logic (such as customer involvement, operant resource and so on) that is more complex than goods-dominant logic. Hence, this research built a S-D based input-output analysis approach for measuring technology spillovers to resolve the above problem. The S-D based approach also can be considered as a primary groundwork that service firms can continuously add new ideas and improve the S-D based approach for better performance of measuring technology spillovers. On the other hand, service firms can employ the S-D based approach to explore possible applications that can be adopted these innovative and novel techniques based on empirical analysis and synthesis.

Consequently, service firms can find the opportunity of exporting these techniques to increase the application areas that they can gain high business benefits. Meanwhile, since these innovative and novel techniques have been applied to many areas and became more and more important, service firms, thus, became predominant to have a competitive market position.

9.2.2 Academic Implications

With the development and deployment of the U2EX service system, we realize