Abstract
This paper investigates the price and service rate decisions in a customer-intensive service in an M/M/1 queue system under the influence of social interactions, where a higher value of the service is perceived if more customers purchase the service. The customer-intensive nature of the service requires a low service speed to maintain its quality, which may increase the congestion of the system. Two cases where customers are either homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of the customer intensity are considered. It is found that social interactions can always benefit the service provider as more expected revenue can be achieved, and potential profits would be lost if the influence of social interactions is ignored. For the case with heterogeneous customers, the optimal price and service rate decisions are solved with or without considering social interaction effect. The study finds the proportions of high and low sensitive customers and the social interaction intensity are critical to the operational decisions and the market coverage strategies. These results offer a better understanding on the interplay between the quality-speed conundrum and the influence of social interactions in customers’ purchase behaviour in managing customer-intensive services.
Highlights
A customer-intensive service requires a high level of customer contact between the service provider and customers during the delivery and/or consumption process
Besides the quality-speed conundrum, service providers of customer-intenstive services may be more unwilling to increase the service rate to reduce the length of the queue and/or the waiting time when customers are influenced by social interactions in service consumption
This paper investigates the price and service rate decisions for a service provider which offers a customer-intensive service to customers under social interactions, where more demand of the service increases customers’ perceived service value
Summary
A customer-intensive service requires a high level of customer contact between the service provider and customers during the delivery and/or consumption process. Besides the quality-speed conundrum, service providers of customer-intenstive services may be more unwilling to increase the service rate to reduce the length of the queue and/or the waiting time when customers are influenced by social interactions in service consumption. In contrast to the existing studies on the operational decisions in this type of service, it takes the influence of social interactions into consideration in customers’ purchase decision-making It considers a single service firm with the objective to maximize the revenue which provides a customer-intensive service in the consumer market.
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