Structuring service delivery processes: An examination of problems in retail banking and telephone center design

Structuring service delivery processes is a compelling problem for many firms. Structuring delivery processes involves creating and deploying combinations of service functions for a firm to compete effectively and contain costs. This dissertation examines how two common services, retail banking and consumer support and sales through telephone centers, combine service functions into delivery processes.;Structuring service delivery in retail banking involves technology choice and customer segmentation in a competitive market. The retail banking market has changed drastically over the past three decades due to changing technology and customer preferences. New technologies, such as PC banking systems, create more efficient and lower cost transaction channels. However, customers have divergent preferences for various technologies and may reject new technologies in seeking to maximize their own utility. An equilibrium model of a retail banking market addresses how this tension is resolved in a market in which customer demand responds to bank choices, and banks are free to enter or exit the market as profits allow. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that customer preferences for convenience and technology, rather than a technology's cost structure, are the source of significant shifts in the strategies that banks employ at equilibrium.;A significant part of service delivery structure for a telephone center consists of establishing a number of telephone centers and allocating a variety of tasks to those centers. Telephone centers permeate both service and manufacturing industries, and design of those centers is growing increasingly complex from increasing volume and variety of tasks. Tasks of a significantly different nature, such as e-mail inquiries and outbound sales, create uncertainties about the ultimate result of combining them in the same center. Two complementary models examine the optimal allocation of tasks to telephone centers and provide insights into how operational and human resource constraints interact. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that larger telephone centers, with more tasks, are appropriate as call volumes and variety increase. However, combining tasks with significant differences, such as inbound support calls and outbound sales calls, is less appropriate in high volume centers and when the incremental cost of training employees for both tasks is high.