Service guarantee redress options in a hotel environment

Unconditional service guarantees are a popular marketing tool in the hotel industry worldwide. They promise total satisfaction and guests are free to invoke the guarantee whenever they are dissatisfied. While many hotels offer “money-back” compensation following guarantee invocation, others vary the payout depending on the severity of the service failure and still others will only compensate the customer if the problem leading to invocation of the guarantee cannot be fixed. To the researcher’s knowledge, the influence of compensation and fix (i.e., taking action to resolve the problem) on consumers’ perceptions of distributive justice has not been examined previously in a service guarantee context. This paper begins to address this gap by presenting a conceptual model and related propositions, arguing that redress (compensation and fix) is an important predictor of consumers’ perceptions of distributive justice, and that this relationship is moderated by service failure severity.

Service recovery in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service failure severity and fix on hotel guests’ satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 130 online panel members. As expected, guests are less dissatisfied following a minor (versus a major) service failure while satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected. Surprisingly, fix has a stronger influence on satisfaction when a severe failure occurs, and satisfaction evaluations are approximately equal regardless of the severity of the failure when the problem is fixed.

The influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on consumers' postcomplaint negative WOM intentions in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on hotel guests’ negative word-ofmouth (WOM) intentions following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 131 online panel members. Results suggest that negative WOM intentions reduced when a greater level of effort is exerted by staff in rectifying the guest’s problem and increased when a more severe failure is experienced. There is a stronger difference in guests’ negative WOM intentions between the high and low employee effort conditions when a minor versus a severe service failure is experienced by guests.

Justice-based service recovery in a service guarantee context

Although many service organisations have committed resources to developing service guarantee programmes, empirical research assessing their influence of consumers' post purchase evaluations is limited. This thesis addresses this deficiency in the guarantee literature by adapting and extending an established model of perceived justice and consumer satisfactionto the service guarantee context.

Who chose this restaurant anyway? The effect of responsibility for choice, guarantees and failure stability on customer complaining

Customers often behave in the context of a group, with different behavior occurring in this context to that which transpires in an individual context. However, customer complaining behavior (CCB), including voice, negative word of mouth, in addition to that transmitted electronically, and exit, in a group setting has not been studied previously. A service failure during a group celebration at a restaurant and the pattern of CCB that ensues is examined. This is based on customers’ level of responsibility in restaurant selection on behalf of the group, the presence of an unconditional service guarantee, and the perceived stability of the failure. Findings suggest that customers are more inclined to exit when they have participated to a greater degree in choice and that the presence of an unconditional guarantee interacts with participation to influence negative word of mouth intentions. Perceived failure stability had the greatest influence on CCB.

The influence of guarantee compensation and fix on service recovery

This study employed a 3 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service guarantee compensation and fix on hotel guests’ satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 390 online panel members. As expected, satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected, however overcompensating guests beyond what was initially promised does not enhance satisfaction evaluations. Increasing compensation from the low to the medium (promised) level results in stronger satisfaction ratings when the problem is fixed versus when it is not.

There's a fly in my soup : the influence of service guarantees and personal requests on customer voice

Anecdotal evidence suggests that service guarantees and personal requests by service workers encourage customers to voice following failure. However, empirical support for these tactics in facilitating complaints to the organisation is limited. To address this deficiency, a 3 (guarantee treatment: none, unconditional or combined) x 2 (personal request to voice: yes or no) x 2 (failure severity: minor or major) full factorial, between subjects experiment was conducted in a restaurant context. Findings suggest that offering a service guarantee, regardless of whether it is unconditional or combined, can encourage voice. Severity of the failure was also found to be associated with voice. Surprisingly, however, a personal request to voice was not related to customers’ voice intentions. Implications of the findings are discussed.

社区宽带综合业务网服务质量保证的研究

社区宽带综合业务网络系统使用交换式以太网技术，在一个物理网络上为社区用户提供Internet接入、数字电视、IP电话等服务，对三网融合进行了实践性探讨。提出并实现了一套保证系统服务质量的方法，并在测试中取得了满意的效果。

发布订阅系统服务保障技术研究

随着分布式计算环境的出现和分布式应用的不断发展，发布/订阅作为一种新的通信模型为分布式应用提供了松散耦合的协同工作方式。这种通信模型为通讯的各方提供了时间上、空间上、控制流等方面的松散耦合，为应用的匿名访问提供了可能性，使得应用更加容易重新配置。与此同时，工业界也出现了相应的标准以及业界产品来实现这种通信模型。目前，发布订阅系统解决了很多基本的功能方面的问题，如数据模型、匹配算法和事件路由等；然而，随着部署于发布订阅系统中应用的不断增加，与系统非功能性相关的系统服务质量成为影响系统是否成功的重要因素。与发布订阅系统相关的非功能性的系统服务质量属性主要包括事件分发性能、顺序性、发送可靠性、优先级、安全性以及事务性等。本文主要关注于其中最重要的几个方面：事件分发性能、发送可靠性、顺序性。 首先，本文分析了事件分发的主要机制，包括订阅的组织、事件的匹配、路由等。已有的事件匹配分发优化策略多关注于订阅的内部特征进行优化，如覆盖优化和合并优化等。本文从应用的角度出发，将事件的分布特性、订阅的分布特性引入到事件匹配分发机制中；在订阅的组织中引入了过滤器的匹配代价以及匹配可能性，考虑不同订阅、不同过滤器的匹配次序对事件分发过程的影响，选取最优的匹配次序。我们证明了选取最优匹配次序问题是一个NP问题，给出了事件匹配分发优化贪心算法，并给出了一种用于数值型过滤器快速匹配的索引结构。 其次，在有限的代理网络资源下，当过多的发布者和订阅者进入系统中时，系统由于处理能力不足会引发事件过载问题。已有研究多采用尽力而为的方式进行处理，无法保障订阅者的订阅请求以及发布者的事件分发；为此，本文提出了一种准入控制机制RacsCBPS来解决发布订阅系统的事件过载问题。RacsCBPS 使用松散耦合的方式将事件的流量特征扩散到代理网络中去，然后针对订阅者发出的订阅进行资源需求计算，进而判定代理节点是否会造成事件过载。最后给出了一种分布式准入控制算法，解决了代理网络上的事件过载问题。 本文还研究了发布订阅系统的事件发送保证问题。事件发送保证可以分为两部分，即事件在代理网络中的传输保证以及事件在代理网络和客户端之间的传输保证。我们首先给出了一种代理网络上的事件发送保证协议，其中包括单节点发送保证协议和多代理节点发送保证协议；然后研究了移动客户端的发送保证问题，针对已有移动迁移协议的不足，提出了一种新的迁移保证协议，该协议可以保证事件分发的顺序性和可靠性。 最后，本文介绍了发布订阅原型系统，给出了原型系统的体系结构、主要组件以及功能实现，它对上述研究工作成果进行了实现和验证。

Service guarantees and customer satisfaction: an empirical study of guarantee type and service experience

Scenario analysis was used to examine empirically the relationships between guarantee type and service experience, and consumer satisfaction, for the service of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The scenarios involved hypothetical situations in which several factors were varied: the existence of a problem; the invocation of a guarantee, the identity of the invoker; and the manner of resolution of any problem. Alternative service guarantees were associated with each hypothetical experience: a specific guarantee, and an unconditional guarantee. Overall, consumer satisfaction related to the nature of the service experience much more strongly than it did to the difference in guarantee type.

Weighted fairness with MCR guarantee and a general-purpose explicit rate allocation algorithm for ATM ABR service

In this paper, weighted fair rate allocation for ATM available bit rate (ABR) service is discussed with the concern of the minimum cell rate (MCR). Weighted fairness with MCR guarantee has been discussed recently in the literature. In those studies, each ABR virtual connection (VC) is first allocated its MCR, then the remaining available bandwidth is further shared among ABR VCs according to their weights. For the weighted fairness defined in this paper, the bandwidth is first allocated according to each VC's weight; if a VC's weighted share is less than its MCR, it should be allocated its MCR instead of the weighted share. This weighted fairness with MCR guarantee is referred to as extended weighted (EXW) fairness. Certain theoretical issues related to EXW, such as its global solution and bottleneck structure, are first discussed in the paper. A distributed explicit rate allocation algorithm is then proposed to achieve EXW fairness in ATM networks. The algorithm is a general-purpose explicit rate algorithm in the sense that it can realise almost all the fairness principles proposed for ABR so far whilst only minor modifications may be needed.