| This dissertation investigates the issues of quality in a customer service context. In particular, human error analysis is employed for this quality investigation to bring a human factors perspective to service quality. Two theoretical frameworks are proposed for this purpose. The Customer Service Stage and Quality framework defines a series of process stages to be accomplished in customer service. The CAMSE framework describes customer service in terms of the interactions between the essential components in a customer service system. We studied the conventional setting of customer service with a human agent as the primary interface with the customer. In addition, WWW-based customer service, such as on-line banking or travel reservation, was a second focus of this study.; In this study, travel agency service is the domain of interest. Both customers and travel agents were interviewed to collect detailed incidents of service error. The active failures and latent failures of these error incidents reported were then identified and classified into different classification schemes. These classification results, in terms of the two theoretical frameworks proposed and the data-based failure patterns, were examined and cross-tabulated to determine the quality issues and implications. In addition to these qualitative results, for each error incident, subjective ratings on quality components as well as the overall evaluation on service quality and customer satisfaction were also collected.; It is found that the two frameworks proposed are together appropriate schemes for classifying the customer service errors collected. Our data further suggest that, in addition to our focus on the customers, a complete framework for quality analysis in customer service should also take the actual service/product providers into account. In particular, it is crucial to consider the dynamic nature of the performance of actual providers as well as the demands of the customers. For both the conventional settings with human agents and the WWW-based systems, the appropriateness of the communication construct with the customer is found crucial to the quality of customer service. Other issues, such as outcome quality versus process quality and the employment of multiple classification schemes to analyze errors in customer service, are also discussed. |
