Service Spotlights

Commentary—Smart Service Systems: Bridging the Silos (p. 359)

Service science is a vital emerging interdisciplinary field that draws heavily on many traditional academic disciplines. These include the highly technical, such as operations research and computer science, as well as the human-oriented concentrations of social science. Academics as well as practitioners in the traditional disciplines often “speak a language” not understood by outsiders. One may say they live in silos! But impactful service science requires the combined synergistic expertise of multiple silo dwellers. We need to be able to easily create teams that are multidisciplinary; you might even call them “transdisciplinary.” A comprehensive urban transportation project, for instance, would require the shared expertise of urban planners, traffic engineers, optimization specialists, queueing theorists, economists, psychologists, and more. Team members need to become multilingual, fostering intra-team communication. And they must understand that most true improvements in services are human-centered. Technology is nice, often required, but the human element usually dominates in determining the preferred solution. Our commentary draws insights from a National Science Foundation-funded workshop (2014), focusing on three challenges: (1) designing service systems with human beings (not just technology) in mind; (2) fostering transdisciplinary research; and (3) forging new kinds of partnerships among diverse stakeholders.

Service Marketing and Adoption of Promotional Technology: A Qualitative Study (p. 368)

What changes to organizational processes and structures must be made to accommodate adoption of promotional technologies that are new to a service firm? This article reports interviews with dyads of marketers and information technology (IT) personnel involved in these dynamics to understand what occurs at the interface between two key functional areas following technology adoption. Individuals in each dyad described their feelings and how they adapted to their new realities, including changes they had to make personally as well as the resulting modifications in organizational structure and work processes. The findings suggest that, given demands of engaging in more intensive collaboration, there is a realized need to develop more interactive workflow processes to allow for improved communication and understanding, to assist in decision making, and to reduce the likelihood of internal conflict. For instance, at a digital imaging provider that adopted dramatically different online features for customers, it was necessary to redesign workflow processes to demand interaction between the marketing and IT areas much earlier than was previously required to allow for input prior to making decisions that would force the other functional area into difficult or impossible situations. In summary, both functional areas found it necessary to become increasingly interactive and cross-disciplinary.

Smart Data Pricing: The Value of Shared Data Plans (p. 386)

This paper investigates the economics of shared data plans. Shared data plans are widespread in today’s mobile service market, including both plans shared across multiple devices owned by a user, and plans shared across multiple users with a shared account. We consider two typical pricing strategies commonly adopted by a monopolist telecom operator servicing a simplified market where each user subscribes to two mobile devices (e.g., a phone and a tablet): partitioned pricing (a separate data plan for each device) and bundled pricing (a shared data plan across the user’s two devices). We show that the value of bundled pricing is driven by several key economic factors: marginal usage cost and the characteristics of consumer mobile usages. In particular, we show that a higher degree of complementarity or a lower degree of substitution between the device usages many not lead to higher value of the shared data plan, which is counter to the common sense that shared data plans are more attractive for complementary products. Our findings shed new light into the design of mobile data plans.

Inventory Service Target in Quick Response Fashion Retail Supply Chains (p. 406)

In the fashion industry, different brands have different inventory service targets. For example, fast fashion brands tend to set a relatively low inventory service target whereas many department stores aim to achieve an excellent inventory service level with a minimum stock out rate. Nowadays, to achieve the desirable inventory service target without the need of carrying a lot of inventory, fashion brands commonly adopt the quick response practice. In this paper, the author conducts an analytical study to explore how the inventory service target affects the expected benefit of quick response, the reduction of profit risk under quick response, the expected gain of social welfare, and the achievability of the win–win situation in the supply chain. Among various derived findings, the data reveal that for any inventory service target, quick response is not only beneficial to the fashion supply chain system in which its expected profit is improved and its profit risk is reduced, but also good for sustainability and corporate social responsibility because its implementation enhances the social welfare. These findings provide a strong support to the implementation of quick response in the fashion industry.

Understanding Online Shopping Adoption in India: Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) with Perceived Risk Application (p. 420)

Why do only a small proportion of customers buy online in India? What factors influence online shopping in India and other emerging economies? The authors address these issues by analyzing empirically the drivers of online shopping and its perceived risk in India. The study provides new insights on the cash-on-delivery (COD) mode of payment and its relation to behavioral intention in online shopping. Using data from 500 online shoppers, the authors show that perceived risk is negatively associated with behavioral intention whereas drivers are positively associated with behavioral intention. The insight for management is as follows: online retailers in India and other emerging economies must understand both drivers and risks so that they can create an environment in which customers will trust and adopt online shopping.