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Managing Customer Expectations and Priorities in Service Systems
在服务系统中管理客户期望和优先级
Qiuping Yu
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, qiupyu@indiana.edu
Gad Allon
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, gadallon@wharton.upenn.edu
Achal Bassamboo
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, a-bassamboo@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Seyed Iravani
Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, s-iravani@northwestern.edu
We study how to use delay announcements to manage customer expectations while allowing a firm to prioritize among customers with different sensitivities to time and value. We examine this problem by developing a framework which characterizes the strategic interaction between the firm and heterogeneous customers. When the firm has information about the state of the system, yet lacks information on customer types, delay announcements play a dual role: they inform customers about the state of the system, while they also have the potential to elicit information on customer types based on their response to the announcements. The tension between these two goals has implications for the type of information that can be shared credibly. To explore the value of the information on customer types, we also study a model where the firm can observe customer types. We show that having information on the customer type may improve or hurt the credibility of the firm. While the creation of credibility increases the firmrsquo;s profit, the loss of credibility does not necessarily hurt its profit.
我们研究如何使用延迟公告来管理客户的期望，同时允许公司区分不同时间和价值的客户之间的优先级。我们通过开发一个框架来研究这个问题，它描述了企业和异质客户之间的战略互动。当企业有关于系统状态的信息，但缺乏关于客户类型的信息时，延迟通知起到双重作用：它们告知客户关于系统状态的信息，同时它们也有可能根据客户对其类型的响应来获取客户类型的信息。这两个目标之间的紧张关系对可靠共享的信息类型产生了影响。为了探索客户类型信息的价值，我们还研究了一个模型，其中企业可以观察客户类型。我们发现拥有客户类型的信息可能会改善或损害公司的信誉。虽然信誉的产生增加了公司的利润，但信誉的损失并不一定会损害公司的利润。
1. Introduction
Delay announcements are common practice in service systems. Firms use delay announcements to inform customers about the congestion level of the system. Among others, ComEd provides delay announcements to its customers, such as “your waiting time is about 4 minutes.” In service systems where the queue is not visible to customers, delay announcements may influence customersrsquo; expectation about their waiting time and thus their decisions of whether to join the system or not.Consequently, to maximize the service providerrsquo;s value and minimize the costs, it is important for the firm to understand how to use delay announcements to influence customer behavior. However, this is a complex problem, which depends on the dynamic of the underlying service system, the structure of the delay announcements, customersrsquo; strategic behavior and their heterogeneity. Note that, in the service industry, the customer population is often heterogeneous along various dimensions and the firm may have limited capability to segment customers. While many call centers may request customers to reveal service types by choosing one of the options provided through the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, they may still have limited capability to differentiate the types of their customers due to various reasons. First of all, the call centers can only provide a limited number of options in the IVR system which cannot provide sufficient information for the call center to identify the specific reasons for the calls. Even if a customer has chosen a particular option, there is still remaining unknown information to be elicited about the customersrsquo; value of service and patience. Moreover, many customers may simply skip the IVR system and request to speak to the agent immediately. In this paper, we study how the firm should use delay announcements to manage customersrsquo; expectations and priorities, when it does not directly observe the types of its heterogeneous customers. To study the value the firm may gain or lose by observing customer types, we will also explore a model where we allow the firm to observe customer types.
1.介绍
延迟通知是服务系统中的常见做法。公司使用延迟通知通知客户关于系统的拥塞程度。除此之外，COMED向客户提供延迟通知，例如“等待时间大约为4分钟”。在服务系统中，用户无法看到队列，延迟通知会影响客户对等待时间的期望，从而影响客户的决策。因此，为了最大限度地提高服务提供商的价值和最小化成本，企业了解如何使用延迟通知来影响客户行为是很重要的。然而，这是一个复杂的问题，这取决于底层服务系统的动态、延迟公告的结构、客户的策略行为以及它们的异质性。值得注意的是在服务行业中，客户群体通常是沿不同维度的异质性，而企业可能有有限的能力来细分客户。虽然许多呼叫中心可以请求客户通过选择交互式语音应答（IVR）系统提供的选项之一来揭示服务类型，但由于各种原因，它们可能仍然具有有限的能力来区分客户的类型。首先，呼叫中心只能在IVR系统中提供有限数量的选项，不能为呼叫中心提供足够的信息来识别呼叫的具体原因。即使顾客选择了一个特定的选择，仍然有关于顾客的服务价值和耐心的未知信息。此外，许多客户可能只是跳过IVR系统，并要求立即与代理通话。在本文中，我们研究公司应该如何使用延迟公告来管理客户的期望和优先级，当它不直接观察其异质客户的类型。为了研究企业通过观察客户类型而获得或失去的价值，我们也将探索一种模型，在这种模型中，我们允许公司观察客户类型。
Given customers are heterogeneous, our model has two important features: 1) The customers
may have different patience times and may value the service offered by the firm differently, which is private information to the customers; and 2) Given that the customers value the service differently and have different patience times, the firm may want to prioritize the customers. To this end, our work is related to the literature on delay announcements with strategic firm and strategic customers and the literature on priority queues. Note that previous works on the strategic interaction between the customers and the firm through delay announcements focus on the case with homogeneous customers. Thus, in this literature, customersrsquo; identity is known to the firm. The firm uses delay announcements only to inform customers about the system congestion, as a way to manage customersrsquo; expectations regarding their anticipated delay. However, in our context, customers are heterogeneous and the firm does not directly observe the different values of obtaining the service for the customers or the customersrsquo; patience times. Thus, for announcements to be effective, the firm may also use delay announcements to elicit information about customersrsquo; preference, besides using it to inform customers
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