Global Journal of Business Management

ISSN 2736-1721

Global Journal of Business Management ISSN 6731-4538 Vol. 8 (7), pp. 001-011, July, 2014. © International Scholars Journals

Full Length Research Paper

Service failures identification: The involvement of the interrelation effect in service practices

Ming-Chun Tsai1*, Shu-Ping Lin2 and Ya-Hui Chan2

1Department of Business Administration, Chung-Hua University, Hsin-Chu 300, Taiwan.

2Department of Technology Management, Chung-Hua University, Hsin-Chu 300, Taiwan.

Accepted 25 January, 2014

Abstract

The emergence of new information technologies (IT) changed the way organizations carried out their day-to-day operations. In view of the significant capital investments and expenditures with the IT service, organizations were concerned about what the impact of investment will be on the performance. Thus, drawing up a service failure recovery program with the consideration of cost-effectiveness was the primary concern in order to maintain a sustainable competition. In response, the purpose of this study was to develop a new decision-making model by integrating the Importance-Performance-Gap model and DEMATEL approach to understand the customers’/managers’ perceptions and clarify the interrelationship on service practices to help identify the critical service failures. The study validated the model by using data collected from an online tax declaration service in Taiwan. The results indicated that considering interrelationship effects of service practices based on the managers’ perceptions was beneficial for extracting more critical service failures. Some practical implications from the empirical case were also discussed.

Key words: Service failures, Customer’s/Manager’s perception, interrelationship effect, DEMATEL, Importance-performance-gap analysis, IT/IS service.