Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Incorporating Customer Satisfaction into Service Operations Management Industry observers have emphasized the importance of incorporating customer satisfaction into firms' operational policies. However, there is a lack of analytical models due to the multidimensionality of service quality and its wide range of impacts on customers' behavior. Despite service access quality has been extensively studied in operations management, the focus is not on the overall customer relationship and the link between the service access quality and future demand is usually overlooked. By ignoring the effect of customers' satisfaction on their retention and repatronage intention, not only firms may over or under-estimate the future demand and take suboptimal operational decisions, but also they may harm their future marketing activities. The long term objective of my research is guided by the question: “How to help managers to achieve a sustainable growth in the service industry?” My goal is to quantify the impact of customers' satisfaction on their behavior and capture the interdependencies among operational decisions, marketing mix activities, and the service quality. I'll pursue three objectives. A) Better understanding the relationship between service access quality and customers' behavior. Service access measures are recorded in many service firms, specifically in call centers and can be linked to customers' reactions (e.g., retention or purchase frequency). Using data analytics techniques, I aim to quantify the effects of service access quality on customers' behavior. B) Optimizing operational decisions, incorporating customer satisfaction. Assuming customer satisfaction can be increased by improving service access quality, it becomes a key controllable aspect of a firm's relation with its customers. I will develop an analytical framework to track the flow of customers in response to service quality. Two models will be built to study the effect of competition and the behavior of strategic customers. C) Coordinating marketing and operational decisions, incorporating customer satisfaction. By coordinating operations and marketing decisions, a firm can effectively leverage service access quality to control customers' responses to the firm's acquisition and retention efforts. I aim to build an analytical integrated model that couple marketing and operational decisions, considering direct and indirect impacts of customers' satisfaction on their future demand. The proposed research agenda builds an analytically tractable framework that advances our understanding of the complex relation between operations and marketing decisions, and enables managers to identify and analyze feedback loops that govern the growth of the firm. This understanding is specifically beneficial for new startups, future drivers of Canadian economic growth, looking to reach their target growth rate.