The Interface Management Of Customer Service System: Its Theory, Mechanism And The Empirical Study On Hotel Industry

Servicizing is the inevitable tendency in economic development. For all the new service enterprises and traditional enterprises, promoting level of service operation has been the basic measures of formatting product difference and pooling competitive edge. Nowadays, our country makes strive to advance service economy,so it is very important for the service times to speed up the upgrading of service management level of China service industry and all the enterprises.Interface management is a kind of integration control method focusing on the interactive behavior, interactive relation and interactive element, which core mission is to construct the interface bridge, eliminate cross-interactive obstacles between the interactive main bodies, and support in interactive environment for enhancing the overall efficiency of system. Customer service system is a typical interactive system and it contains service interaction between customers and enterprise and working interaction between internal function main bodies, where there are lots of interactive obstacles.The concept and theory of interface management is introduced to the practice and research field of service management can help to recognize logically at a unified perspective the complex interactive relation in service system and help to carry out the integration management for the internal work interaction and external enterprise-customer interaction. All this contributes to enhance the total service efficiency of service system and the experience quality of customers.In this study, a comprehensive analysis of the use of literature reviews, interviews, factor analysis, multiple stepwise regression, ANOVA, T tests, multiple comparison analysis, factor evaluation and matrix modeling to systematically study the interface management of customer service system. This study is divided into three phases: theoretical research phase, empirical research phase and comprehensive research phases.At the theoretical research phase, this study discusses the origin, basis of concept and the theoretical system of interface management through the methods of literature reviews and theoretical induction, and comparing the theory of interface management with the relative service theories. Based on this, this study defines and discusses the basic concepts such as service, customer service system, service interface, interface obstacle, hotel service and hotel service system. After that, this study summarizes the cause's structure of interface obstacles and the basic field of service interface research and put forward the basic structure of service interface system.The empirical research includes four aspects: the First, this study test empirical the driving mechanism of service capacity and service performance influenced by interface management. This study develops the measure scale of service interface management aiming at hotel industry's employees. The empirical results show that the interface management has the significant action to drive the upgrading of staff's service knowledge, service technique and service attitude which constituting service capacity. At the same time, interface management can drive significantly staff's perceived personal service performance and overall hotel service performance. The explaining contributions of interface management in staff's personal service performance are more than in overall hotel service performance.The Second, this study test empirical the driving mechanism of customer's perceived performance and customer's quality evaluation influenced by interface management. This study develops the measure scale of service interface management aiming at hotel industry's customers. The empirical results show that the interface management has significant driving action to customer's perceived service performance, perceived experience performance and customer's service quality evaluation and experience quality evaluation. Simultaneously, the perceived service performance has Full Mediation between interface management and customer's service quality evaluation. The perceived experience performance has Full Mediation between interface management and customer's experience quality evaluation. The service quality has Partial Mediation between the interface management and customer's experience quality.The Third, this study analysis comparatively the expectations level and perceived level in interface presentation of hotel industry's customers. The research shows that the expectations level is more than the perceived level in interface presentation of hotel industry's customers. And the female customers, the customers whose age is under 18 years or over 65 years, the customers whose occupation is teacher or Self-employed persons are special customer types. Customers perceived level in interface presentation is in direct proportion with the stars level of hotel enterprise. The findings show that the traditional scale method of service quality overlook the internal interaction which makes it can not scale completely and effectively the decisive factors of service quality.The Fourth, based on the theoretical and empirical findings, this study building up a set of multi-dimensional evaluation index system which consists of 12 objective indexes, 5 indexes evaluated by customer, 8 indexes evaluated by staff and 1 index evaluated by expert to measure comprehensively the level of interface management of service enterprises. Through the evaluation method based on factor analysis, this study evaluates the level of interface management of 15 hotel enterprises.At the comprehensive research phases, based on the findings of structure level and the driving mechanism of service interface, this study put forward the method of design and develop service interface and construct the technique tools of designing and developing service interface based on the matrix analysis ideas. This study finds that the types of interface defects include serious defects, medium defects and minor defects. Relatively the optimizing management of service interface should choose total change optimization, partial improved optimization and minor adjusted optimization. Both in theory and in practice, it is a new trying to introduce the theory and method of interface management into service management. The achieved innovation of this paper's work includes six aspects:Firstly, this study introduced the theory of interface management into the research of service management; Secondly, this study put forward the structural model of customer service system based on the theory induction; Thirdly, this study proposed the measure scale of interface management aiming to hotel industry's employees and customers respectively; Fourthly, this study test empirical the driving mechanism of service capacity and service performance influenced by interface management, And test empirical the driving mechanism of customer's perceived performance and customer's quality evaluation influenced by interface management. Fifthly, this study constructs a set of comprehensive evaluation system based on the factor analysis which combines the staff evaluation, customer evaluation, expert's evaluation and objective index. Sixthly, this study develops the technique tools of designing and developing service interface system based on the matrix theory and put forward its process of analysis and operation.