Customer service

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. Each industry requires different levels of customer service, but towards the end, the idea of a well-performed service is that of increasing revenues. The perception of success of the customer service interactions is dependent on employees "who can adjust themselves to the personality of the customer". Customer service is often practiced in a way that reflects the strategies and values of a firm. Good quality customer service is usually measured through customer retention. Customer service for some firms is part of the firm’s intangible assets and can differentiate it from others in the industry. One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds towards the organization. Customer service does not only focus on the external aspect of the organization, but also the internal relations that facilitate the business activity. For

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Review of electricity sector reform in five large, oil- and gas-exporting MENA countries: Current status and outlook

Ralf Matthias Dyllick-Brenzinger, Matthias Finger

Since the early 80s, numerous developed and also developing countries on all continents have embarked on reforms of their national electricity sectors with varying degrees of ambition. The reforms were associated with hopes for accelerated innovation, enhanced customer service and, most importantly, efficiency gains in the operation of the sector and thus lower electricity costs for the consumers. Sector reform legislation in the five analyzed countries (Algeria, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) has been enacted rather late, commencing at the end of the 90s. The countries' abundant and cheap energy resources mitigated pressures for reforms and delayed the introduction of market principles in the sector's organization. All five countries have since adopted more market-oriented sector structures, though none have as yet implemented their target sector models. This study reviews past reform efforts, analyzes the different approaches and provides an outlook for the countries' future reform agendas.

2013

Aligning Value and Implementation in Service Design: A Systemic Approach

Arash Golnam, Philippe Laprade, Julien Ramboz, Gil Regev, Alain Wegmann

The promise of service design is to enable a service supplier to prosper by delivering continuous value to customers. This prosperity is of strategic value to the service supplier. There is value in a service for both the service supplier and its service customers. We call these two values, service supplier value and service adopter value. When designing a service it is necessary to align both value propositions with the service components and service features. To this end, we propose to use a systemic method where whole (i.e. black box) and composite (i.e. white box) reasoning are interleaved on both the organizational and functional dimensions. We begin by producing an as-is model that describes how the value is created for the customer and how it is captured by the service supplier. Service improvement opportunities are identified in terms of value to both service adopter and service supplier. A to-be model is built that specifies the new interaction between actors and their new responsibilities and thereby, new service components and features. The method is illustrated with an example based on the service offering and implementation of Amazon.com in Amazon Marketplace.

2012

Modeling Value Creation and Capture in Service Systems

Arash Golnam, Vijay Viswanathan, Alain Wegmann

In service-dominant (S-D) logicvalue is viewed as being co-created between companies, customers, and other actors within a service system. In order to understand how service systems maintain their viability and competitiveness, two fundamental questions should be addressed: "how is value created for and with the customers in service systems?" and, "how is the value captured by the service provider in service systems?". The first question deals with "value creation" while the second addresses "value capture"in the "service value equation". The extant research mainly focuses on the service design from the value creation perspective. Thereby, there has been little discussion about suppliers' value capture and its trade off with value created for and with service customers. In this paper. adapting a holistic perspective, weintroduce a modeling framework that can assist in the understanding and the analysis of value creation and capture and their interplay in service systems. We illustrate the applicability of our framework by conducting a descriptive case study of the value creation and capture in Amazon service system in the period between 1997-2001.

Springer-Verlag Berlin2012

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