Examining the Impact of Service Times on Overall Guest Satisfaction Perception in the Casual Dining Environment

A mystery shopper study was used to examine the influence of service times on customer satisfaction. The impact of management emphasis on service quality was also examined. In the restaurants studied, service time influenced customer satisfaction. Management attention to service time improved performance in direct relationship to the level of emphasis.

The Influence of Selected Antecedents of Frontline Employee's Perceptions of Service Recovery Performance

The purpose of this study is to determine the potential impact of selected organizational factors on boundary-spanning-role employees’ perceptions of service recovery performance. This study also aims to assess the impact of service recovery performance on the intention to leave the job and extrinsic job satisfaction. This study uses a sample of frontline employees in Belek, Antalya, Turkey. The empirical findings revealed that education, team work and role ambiguity as frontline job perceptions were found to exert positive influences on the service recovery performance, but, empowerment, reward, and organizational commitment were found to have negative effects on the service recovery performance.

Implementation of service -learning in higher education courses: Perceptions of faculty

This study examined the motivation of college and university faculty to implement service-learning into their traditional courses. The benefits derived by faculty, as well as those issues of maintenance, including supports and/or obstacles, were also investigated in relation to their impact on motivation. The focus was on generating theory from the emerging data. ^ Data were collected from interviews with 17 faculty teaching courses that included a component of service-learning. A maximum variation sampling of participants from six South Florida colleges and universities was utilized. Faculty participants represented a wide range of academic disciplines, faculty ranks, years of experience in teaching and using service-learning as well as gender and ethnic diversity. For data triangulation, a focus group with eight additional college faculty was conducted and documents, including course syllabi and institutional service-learning handbooks, collected during the interviews were examined. The interviews were transcribed and coded using traditional methods as well as with the assistance of the computerized assisted qualitative data analysis software, Atlas.ti. The data were organized into five major categories with themes and sub-themes emerging for each. ^ While intrinsic or personal factors along with extrinsic factors all serve to influence faculty motivation, the study's findings revealed that the primary factors influencing faculty motivation to adopt service-learning were those that were intrinsic or personal in nature. These factors included: (a) past experiences, (b) personal characteristics including the value of serving, (c) involvement with community service, (d) interactions and relationships with peers, (e) benefits to students, (f) benefits to teaching, and (g) perceived career benefits. Implications and recommendations from the study encompass suggestions for administrators in higher education institutions for supporting and encouraging faculty adoption of service-learning including a well developed infrastructure as well as incentives, particularly during the initial implementation period, rewards providing recognition for the academic nature of service-learning and support for the development of peer relationships among service-learning faculty. ^

Essays in Empirical Operations Management: Bayesian Learning of Service Quality and Structural Estimation of Complementary Product Pricing and Inventory Management

This dissertation contributes to the rapidly growing empirical research area in the field of operations management. It contains two essays, tackling two different sets of operations management questions which are motivated by and built on field data sets from two very different industries --- air cargo logistics and retailing.

The first essay, based on the data set obtained from a world leading third-party logistics company, develops a novel and general Bayesian hierarchical learning framework for estimating customers' spillover learning, that is, customers' learning about the quality of a service (or product) from their previous experiences with similar yet not identical services. We then apply our model to the data set to study how customers' experiences from shipping on a particular route affect their future decisions about shipping not only on that route, but also on other routes serviced by the same logistics company. We find that customers indeed borrow experiences from similar but different services to update their quality beliefs that determine future purchase decisions. Also, service quality beliefs have a significant impact on their future purchasing decisions. Moreover, customers are risk averse; they are averse to not only experience variability but also belief uncertainty (i.e., customer's uncertainty about their beliefs). Finally, belief uncertainty affects customers' utilities more compared to experience variability.

The second essay is based on a data set obtained from a large Chinese supermarket chain, which contains sales as well as both wholesale and retail prices of un-packaged perishable vegetables. Recognizing the special characteristics of this particularly product category, we develop a structural estimation model in a discrete-continuous choice model framework. Building on this framework, we then study an optimization model for joint pricing and inventory management strategies of multiple products, which aims at improving the company's profit from direct sales and at the same time reducing food waste and thus improving social welfare.

Collectively, the studies in this dissertation provide useful modeling ideas, decision tools, insights, and guidance for firms to utilize vast sales and operations data to devise more effective business strategies.

Palliative Medicine:Scoping the level and extent of service provision to people with intellectual disability at end of life Poster Presentation

Background: Concerns exist about the end of life care
that people with intellectual disabilities receive. This population
are seldom referred to palliative care services and
inadequate data sets exist about their place of death.
Aim: To scope the extent of service provision to people
with intellectual disabilities at the end of life by specialist
palliative care and intellectual disability services in one
region of the United Kingdom.
Methods: As part of a larger doctoral study a regional survey
took place of a total sample (n=66) of specialist palliative
care and intellectual disability services using a postal
questionnaire containing forty items. The questionnaire
was informed by the literature and consultation with an
expert reference group. Data were analysed using SPSS to
obtain descriptive statistics.
Results: A total response rate from services of 71.2%
(n=47) was generated. Findings showed a range of experience
among services in providing end of life care to people
with intellectual disabilities in the previous five years, but
general hospitals were reported the most common place of
death. A lack of accessible information on end of life care
for people with learning disabilities was apparent. A few
services (n=14) had a policy to support this population to
make decisions about their care or had used adapted Breaking
Bad News guidelines (n=5) to meet their additional
needs. Both services recognised the value of partnership
working in assessing and meeting the holistic needs of
people with intellectual disabilities at end of life.
Conclusions: A range of experience in caring for people
with intellectual disabilities was present across services,
but more emphasis is required on adapting communication
for this population to facilitate them to participate in their
care. These findings could have international significance
given that studies in other countries have highlighted a
need to widen access to palliative care for this group of
people.

Justified assessments of service provider reputation

Abstract Reputation, influenced by ratings from past clients, is crucial for providers competing for custom. For new providers with less track record, a few negative ratings can harm their chances of growing. In the JASPR project, we aim to look at how to ensure automated reputation assessments are justified and informative. Even an honest balanced review of a service provision may still be an unreliable predictor of future performance if the circumstances differ. For example, a service may have previously relied on different sub-providers to now, or been affected by season-specific weather events. A common way to ameliorate the ratings that may not reflect future performance is by weighting by recency. We argue that better results are obtained by querying provenance records on how services are provided for the circumstances of provision, to determine the significance of past interactions. Informed by case studies in global logistics, taxi hire, and courtesy car leasing, we are going on to explore the generation of explanations for reputation assessments, which can be valuable both for clients and for providers wishing to improve their match to the market, and applying machine learning to predict aspects of service provision which may influence decisions on the appropriateness of a provider. In this talk, I will give an overview of the research conducted and planned on JASPR. Speaker Biography Dr Simon Miles Simon Miles is a Reader in Computer Science at King's College London, UK, and head of the Agents and Intelligent Systems group. He conducts research in the areas of normative systems, data provenance, and medical informatics at King's, and has published widely and manages a number of research projects in these areas. He was previously a researcher at the University of Southampton after graduating from his PhD at Warwick. He has twice been an organising committee member for the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems conference series, and was a member of the W3C working group which published standards on interoperable provenance data in 2013.

Accounting for the Multi-Period Impact of Service When Determining Employee Requirements for Labor Scheduling

Providing good customer service, inexpensively, is a problem commonly faced by managers of service operations. To tackle this problem, managers must do four tasks: forecast customer demand for the service; translate these forecasts into employee requirements; develop a labor schedule that provides appropriate numbers of employees at appropriate times; and control the delivery of the service in real-time. This paper focuses upon the translation of forecasts of customer demand into employee requirements. Specifically, it presents and evaluates two methods for determining desired staffing levels. One of these methods is a traditional approach to the task, while the other, by using modified customer arrival rates, offers a better means of accounting for the multi-period impact of customer service. To calculate the modified arrival rates, the latter method reduces (increases) the actual customer arrival rate for a period to account for customers who arrived in the period (in earlier periods) but have some of their service performed in subsequent periods (in the period). In an experiment simulating 13824 service delivery environments, the new method demonstrated its superiority by serving 2.74% more customers within the specified waiting time limit while using 7.57% fewer labor hours.

Applying Career Concepts to Strengthen the Work-Attitudes of Service Professionals

Given the nature of employment relationships today, service organizations can strengthen the organization commitment levels and reduce the turnover intentions of its professionals through providing job features important to their careers. These features include opportunities to perform challenging work, experience trusting relationships with customers/clients, and obtain extrinsic rewards. Using a sample of alumni from a hospitality business program, hypotheses that these features impact organizational commitment and turnover intentions, partially through strengthening professionals' career commitment, are developed and tested. Findings suggest that challenging work opportunities impact these attitudes both directly and indirectly. So too trusting relationships with customers and clients indirectly impact organization commitment and intent to turnover (ITO). Results also suggest that, as a whole, satisfaction with extrinsic rewards has no effect. However, an analysis of multigroup mediation results revealed that for professionals working in professional service firms, satisfaction with pay reduces both attitudes. Implications for research in organization commitment and ITO, specifically the role and impact of career-based antecedents, are discussed.

Shining Examples of Service When the Lights Went Out: Hotel Employees and Service Recovery during the Blackout of 2003

The electrical outage in the summer of 2003 that interrupted power to thousands of hotels wrought a variety of facilities failures and service-process problems. Fortunately, strong service-recovery efforts from hotel employees mitigated the worst of the blackout’s effects. Using survey data from hotel managers who experienced the blackout, this study highlights those employee actions that most contributed to immediate service recovery; however, the study also reveals limited organizational learning or efforts to failsafe hospitality service from the eventuality of future power failures.

Threat analysis of IoT networks using artificial neural network intrusion detection system

The Internet of things (IoT) is still in its infancy and has attracted much interest in many industrial sectors including medical fields, logistics tracking, smart cities and automobiles. However, as a paradigm, it is susceptible to a range of significant intrusion threats. This paper presents a threat analysis of the IoT and uses an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to combat these threats. A multi-level perceptron, a type of supervised ANN, is trained using internet packet traces, then is assessed on its ability to thwart Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS/DoS) attacks. This paper focuses on the classification of normal and threat patterns on an IoT Network. The ANN procedure is validated against a simulated IoT network. The experimental results demonstrate 99.4% accuracy and can successfully detect various DDoS/DoS attacks.

Using Needs Assessment to Understand Continuing Disability in Patients with Enduring Mental Illness. Implications for Considerations of Service Development

Particular strengths of the MRC Needs for Care Assessment Schedule have been used to investigate the treatment status of patients with persistent psychiatric disability in ways that other needs assessment tools are unable to. One hundred and seventy-nine such patients from three settings; a private sector psychiatric hospital, two public sector day hospitals situated in the same town, and a high security hospital, were found to have a high level of need. Although there were differences between settings, overall these needs were well met in all three. The high level of persistent disability found amongst these patients could not be attributed to failure on the part of those treating them to use the best available methods, or to failures to comply or engage with treatment on the patient's part. In some two thirds of instances persistent disability was best explained by the fact that even the most suitable available treatments have to be considered only partially effective.

Performance evaluation of DCA and SRC on a single bot detection

Malicious users try to compromise systems using new techniques. One of the recent techniques used by the attacker is to perform complex distributed attacks such as denial of service and to obtain sensitive data such as password information. These compromised machines are said to be infected with malicious software termed a “bot”. In this paper, we investigate the correlation of behavioural attributes such as keylogging and packet flooding behaviour to detect the existence of a single bot on a compromised machine by applying (1) Spearman’s rank correlation (SRC) algorithm and (2) the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA). We also compare the output results generated from these two methods to the detection of a single bot. The results show that the DCA has a better performance in detecting malicious activities.

Smart and sustainable public transport systems through improving level and quality of service

Buses are considered a slow, low comfort and low reliability transport system, thus its negative and por image. In the framework of the 3iBS project (2012), several examples of innovative and/or effective solutions regarding the Level of Service (LoS) were analysed aiming to provide operators, practitioners and policy makers with a set of Good Practice Guidelines to strengthen the competitiveness of the bus in the urban environment. The identification of the key indicators regarding vehicles, infrastructure and operation was possible through the analysis of a set of case studies -among which Barcelona (Spain), Cagliari (Italy), London (United Kingdom), Paris and Nantes (France). A cross comparison between the case studies was carried out for contrasting the level of achievement of the different criteria considered. The information provided on Regulatory, Financial and Technical issues allows the identification of a number of specific factors influencing the implementation of a high quality transport scheme, and set the basis for the elaboration of a set of Guidelines for the implementation of an intelligent, innovative and integrated bus system, including the main barriers to be tackled.

The transformative potential of community engagement in higher education: an analysis of service-learning effects on students, communities, and institutions.

Service-learning in higher education is gaining attention as a reliable tool to support students’ learning and fulfil the mission of higher education institutions (HEIs). This dissertation addresses existing gaps in the literature by examining the effects and perspectives of service-learning in HEIs through three studies. The first study compares the effects of a voluntary semester-long service-learning course with traditional courses. A survey completed by 110 students before and after the lectures found no significant group differences in the psychosocial variables under inspection. Nevertheless, service-learning students showed higher scores concerning the quality of participation. Factors such as students’ perception of competence, duration of service-learning, and self-reported measures may have influenced the results. The second study explores the under-researched perspective of community partners in higher education and European settings. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with community partners from various community organisations across Europe. The results highlight positive effects on community members and organisations, intrinsic motivations, organisational empowerment, different forms of reciprocity, the co-educational role of community partners, and the significant role of a sense of community and belonging. The third study focuses on faculty perspectives on service-learning in the European context. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted in 14 European countries. The findings confirm the transformative impact of service-learning on the community, students, teachers, and HEIs, emphasising the importance of motivation and institutionalisation processes in sustaining engaged scholarship. The study also identifies the relevance of the community experience, sense of community, and community responsibility with the service-learning experience; relatedness is proposed as the fifth pillar of service-learning. Overall, this dissertation provides new insights into the effects and perspectives of service-learning in higher education. It integrates the 4Rs model with the addition of relatedness, guiding the theoretical and practical implications of the findings. The dissertation also suggests limitations and areas for further research.