The Impact of Automation in Service Industries＂ An Empirical Study

Academic research into service industries has explored the characteristics of interpersonal interactions between employees and customers, but there are few studies addressing the issues of consumer interaction with technology and its influence on the objectives and results of the operations subsystem. This study examines the elements of the service encounter, and the changes automation originates in them and their relationships. The paper also examines changes in the elements and results of the operations subsystem, as a result of automation. We propose that the customer＇s relationship with employees and/or technology and automated systems for the service impact the objectives and results of the operations subsystem, all of which could have an effect on the company＇s competitive position. The empirical study is focused on four industries, namely, toll motorways, car parks, carwash and video/DVD rental companies, in an attempt to identify objectives that lead companies to implement automated processes affecting the customer＇s relationship with the company. The hypotheses generated are contrasted with a structural equation modelling. The results confirm that the customer＇s relationship with employees and automated systems for the service impacts the objectives and results of the operations subsystem. Also, the results show how automation can enable firms simultaneously to achieve acceptable levels of flexibility and productivity, two dimensions that have traditionally been considered opposites.

Evaluating service quality of express logistics service based on online reviews using LDA-LSTM

The quality of logistics services affects the performance and competitiveness of express logistics companies.Conventional evaluation methods of service quality are based on constructing a rating index system and then comprehensively evaluating the associated questionnaires and interviews.Such methods are often subjective,time-consuming,and include a limited sample size(data).On the other hand,customers'opinions concerning logistics services can now be deciphered using online customer reviews.Therefore,this study proposes a method combining the models of latent Dirichlet allocation and long-short term memory(LDA-LSTM)to overcome the limitations of conventional evaluation methods.The main contributions include four aspects.First,the LDA-LSTM model can extract comprehensive aspects and opinions to develop evaluation indexes and scores for logistics service quality,and the reviews of a logistics firm can be examined to verify the effectiveness of this method.Second,the LDA-LSTM model can handle a situation in which several aspects and opinions express one topic or sentiment,and it outperforms the joint sentiment topic model(JST)and naive Bayes classification(NB).Third,positive and negative ratings can reflect a firm's overall service quality,with an excellent rating highlighting the best service quality,which can provide a multi-dimensional evaluation.Fourth,we also identify the indicators of logistics service quality on which customers focus,and we compare the service quality among express enterprises in China.