Active and Latent Failures in Customer Services and Opportunities for Quality Innovation for Convenience Stores

• An-Che Chen

  MingChi University of Technology

  Author

Due to the characteristics of customer participation and heterogeneity in service operations, the demands and contents of service tasks are usually with great diversity. Therefore it is usually preferred to conduct failure analysis, instead of the rigidly structured questionnaire, for the purpose of assessment and innovation in service quality. Furthermore, rather than conducting the survey to customers directly that seems to comply with the concept of customer orientation, it possesses great advantages in expertise and insights in failure analysis through service personnel surveys. In this study, service failure cases were collected using the Critical Incident Technique through the interviews to the service personnel from various chain convenience stores in Taiwan. These service failure incidents were then analyzed using the active-latent framework proposed in this study. Both active failures and latent failures from these collected incidents are categorized in hierarchical structures. These two failure categorizations were further mapped for providing empirical bases to the opportunities of quality innovation in system design and personnel training/education for this particular service domain. The interpretations and implications of the resulted failure patterns are also discussed.

1. An-Che Chen, MingChi University of Technology

   Department of Industrial Engineering & Management

• PDF

Copyright (c) 2017 An-Che Chen

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Copyrights for articles published in IJIER journals are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. The journal/publisher is not responsible for subsequent uses of the work. It is the author's responsibility to bring an infringement action if so desired by the author for more visit Copyright & License.