Service provider

About: Service provider is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 55107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 894381 citations. The topic is also known as: external service provider & internal service provider.

The effects of global outsourcing strategies on participants’ attitudes and organizational effectiveness

Abstract: Global outsourcing is a management strategy by which an organization delegates major, non‐core functions to specialized and efficient service providers. Global outsourcing represents a significant shift in the way organizations manage and staff their business support activities. While global outsourcing has received considerable attention from practitioners and consultants, there has been little empirical research published on global outsourcing. This study explores why and how organizations are using global outsourcing and identifies problems that effect global outsourcing success. The results showed that organizations generally considered themselves successful at global outsourcing. However, while they achieved significant improvement in organizational effectiveness, they were not achieving the order of magnitude improvements ascribed to global outsourcing.

Appointment Scheduling Under Patient Preference and No-Show Behavior

Abstract: Motivated by the rising popularity of electronic appointment booking systems, we develop appointment scheduling models that take into account the patient preferences regarding when they would like to be seen. The service provider dynamically decides which appointment days to make available for the patients. Patients arriving with appointment requests may choose one of the days offered to them or leave without an appointment. Patients with scheduled appointments may cancel or not show up for the service. The service provider collects a “revenue” from each patient who shows up and incurs a “service cost” that depends on the number of scheduled appointments. The objective is to maximize the expected net “profit” per day. We begin by developing a static model that does not consider the current state of the scheduled appointments. We give a characterization of the optimal policy under the static model and bound its optimality gap. Building on the static model, we develop a dynamic model that considers the current state of the scheduled appointments, and we propose a heuristic solution procedure. In our computational experiments, we test the performance of our models under the patient preferences estimated through a discrete choice experiment that we conduct in a large community health center. Our computational experiments reveal that the policies we propose perform well under a variety of conditions.

Methods, systems, and computer program products for providing a virtual private gateway between user devices and various networks

Abstract: A communication network is operated by receiving traffic from a user device at a gateway device associated with a gateway service provider, which manages gateways to both secure and insecure networks. The gateway uses security policies to determine if traffic is destined to the secure or insecure network and applies appropriate policies which cause the traffic to be routed, dropped, or analyzed.

The impact of service provider emotional intelligence on customer satisfaction

Abstract: Purpose – This study seeks to examine whether higher emotional intelligence displayed by service providers leads to greater customer satisfaction.Design/methodology/approach – A community sample of 150 participants viewed video clips depicting a service provider displaying three different levels of emotional intelligence in high or low service difficulty transactions.Findings – Higher emotional intelligence displayed by the service provider led to greater reported satisfaction with the service transaction. Further, there was an interaction between emotional intelligence of the service provider and transaction difficulty. In the low transaction difficulty condition there was progressively more satisfaction at each higher level of emotional intelligence of the service provider. In the high transaction difficulty condition, there was low satisfaction in the low service provider emotional intelligence condition, but no significant difference in satisfaction between the high and medium levels of service provid...

Personal service environment management apparatus and methods

Abstract: A Service Network and Personal Service Environment Manager host and manage functionality shared among applications and user groups to provide common, application-independent directory services that serve as a logically central point of access to data. In particular, end-users can manage their service profiles in access- and location-independent scenarios. The PSEM includes functions for providing and managing service data, end-user profile data, and end-user service profile data. Among others, important aspects of the PSEM are its interfaces to other entities and functions, its distinguishing between user profile data and service-related data (i.e., service profile data and service data), and its further distinguishing between service profile data and service data.