Leveraging remote communications in service industries.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 84
Description: This thesis is a study of the implications of using remote communication technologies in service industries. This work consists of two related models.The second part of the thesis suggests a way to modify a service firm's operations to exploit the opportunities provided by communication technologies. By installing remote service facilities at each traditional on-site service site, workers can serve both local and remote demands; and remote demand can be routed to a facility that is not busy with local service. The operations of such a Distributed Contact Centers (DCC) involves determining the firm's staffing and remote demand routing policies based on a queuing model. The DCC operation is compared with centralized contact centers (CCC), where remote and local demands are served by separate operations. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that DCC yields significant cost savings over CCC. In addition, numerical experiments also show DCC provides a more consistent service performance. In order to efficiently solve the DCC problem with a large number of facilities and time periods, an efficient heuristic is developed by utilizing a key property of the optimal solution.In the first part of the thesis, we establish a model of price and time competition between two service firms. Each firm offers both on-site and remote services. Each customer's choice is based on firms' price and customers' expected waiting time, location and preference over the firms. We prove that the existence of competitive equilibrium depends on service differentiation, and investigate the properties of equilibrium price and profit under a range of remote costs. We find that firms do not always benefit from decreasing remote cost.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2294.