Research On The Factors Affecting Service Quality Based On The Developed Service Supply Chain Model

As the competition in the market become increasingly stiff and customers’demands are diverse, the way to run a business has been transformed from a singleoperation into a coalition with suppliers, customers and other partners, which leads tothe need for the supply chain management. Meanwhile, the service supply chainbecomes the research focus of both supply chain management and service operationwith the approaching of the service economy throughout the world. As a newlyemerging area, service supply chain is yet to be specifically described in terms ofdefinition and basic model. Quality management has entered the stage of quality chaincontrol based on supply chain; however, there is little research on service quality froma perspective of service supply chain. Therefore, the research on the construction ofthe service supply chain and the factors affecting service quality based on the servicesupply chain is exceedingly necessary.Based on the above issues, and by reviewing previous literature and theoriesabout the service supply chain, we propose factors like customer-supplier duality,internal service supply, and service quality chain that have never been taken intoaccount in previous research. Then we construct a developed service supply chainmodel on the Ellram professional services supply chain model and IUE-SSCM model,and describe the main part of the network of the service supply chain, serviceintegration and transmission process. After that, we propose a framework of servicesupply chain management and related elements. Secondly, we define the sources ofservice quality, which include the interface source, internal source and the externalsource from a service supply chain perspective, by drawing on the quality chain of themanufacturing. Then the hypotheses on the factors affecting the service quality of theservice supply chain are proposed. In the last part, the hypotheses of factors affectingthe service quality are supported by using SEM analysis. We conclude that internalservice quality and consumer interaction orientation have a positive impact onexternal service quality.In this paper, we construct a developed service supply chain to enrich theconnotation of service supply chain model, which lay the foundation for the furtherresearch of service supply chain theories and provide a new perspective for research on service quality. A supply chain research from a perspective of factors of servicequality provides a new way for improving service quality.