Maintaining Consistent Customer Experience in Service System Networks

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Maintaining Consistent Customer Experience
in Service System Networks
Stephen K. Kwan
College of Business
San José State University
San José, CA, USA
Peter Hottum
Karlsruhe Service Research Institute
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Karlsruhe, Germany
To be presented at the Naples Forum on Service, Ischia, Napoli, Italy, June 18-21, 2013
Abstract
Traditional B2B and B2C value propositions for service offerings are premised on the
service provider convincing the business or consumer customers that they will receive
superior value at certain cost in a competitive environment. As the business environment
becomes more global and complex, the service provider would often have to construct a
network of partners and/or contractors to fulfill the service obligations as promised by
their value propositions. The success of such service system networks depends on the
alignment of value propositions between the service provider and its partners so that the
service obligations are delivered to the customers as promised. Often times this linkage is
broken and the customers are dissatisfied with the level and quality of service provided
within these trilateral constellations. In this research we will look at various scenarios in
service system networks and propose value proposition formulations for multiple level
engagements denoted as B2X2Y. We will also consider “loss-less” derivations of value
propositions as a way of aligning value systems and expectations among the participants
in order to maintain a consistent experience for the customer at different levels of
engagement and forms of encounters in the service system network. We propose an
integration quality gap to account for the difference between customer service quality
expectation and perceived service quality in a service system network.
Keywords: service system networks, value propositions, service science, service quality,
integration quality gap
1. Introduction
1.1 Motivation
This research will be of interest to industry premier IT service providers who are
constantly under competitive and pricing pressure to justify the premium they charge
their customers. At the same time these service providers are hard-pressed to ensure that
their partners and contractors are delivering the superior service promised by the original
value propositions with premium price tags. This research delves into the notion of
moving from B2B (traditional service business model) to B2X2Y that requires alignment
of value systems (service provider, customer, and the customer’s customer) together with

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the execution that can deliver high quality service and consistent customer experience
across the service system network.
1.2 Literature Review
The aspects of value propositions from providers towards customers are fairly understood
in theory. However, “there is no agreement […] what makes [a value proposition]
persuasive” (Anderson, Narus & van Rossum, 2006). Service-Dominant Logic helps us
understand how a value proposition connects partners and enables the co-creation of
value (Spohrer & Kwan 2008). Based on the provider’s initiative, the “value proposition
is accepted, rejected, or unnoticed by other[s]” (Vargo, Maglio & Akaka 2008). Value
propositions can position “the service [system] network in the market in terms of what
they can offer and to whom they market and deliver” (Agarwal & Selen 2011).
There are several approaches with the aim to link different aspects of value propositions
to success factors of a service interaction (Ballantyne & Varey 2006; Levina & Ross
2003). Based on the concept of service systems by Spohrer et al. (2007), Kwan & Müller-
Gorchs (2011) provides a framework for value propositions, where the concepts of
Service Experience, Benefits, Costs, Probability of Success, Quality, Schema for Data
Exchange, Stakeholder Roles, and Performance Metrics are explicitly addressed.
Through this, decision makers get a differentiated view on all aspects of value
propositions and their intended interactions.
The interaction between customers and providers is also a main field of interest in agency
theory, where the customer as ‘principal’ delegates work to the provider as ‘agent’: This
addresses two kinds of questions: the desires or goals can conflict and it is difficult for
the principal to verify what the agent is actually doing. Eisenhardt (1989) compares
behavior-oriented with outcome-oriented contracts: “When the contract between the
principal and agent is outcome based, the agent is more likely to behave in the interests of
the principal.” Gottschalk & Solli-Sæther (2006) describe different maturity level of
service relationships: “When the […] value proposition is working in terms of successful
application of […] resources for the client organization, […] the relationship is ready to
move from the resource stage to the partnership stage.”
A cooperative relationship as one of the fundamentals for relational exchanges is
addressed by Morgan & Hunt (1994). The framework of Relationship marketing is built
on the main components of Relationship Commitment and Trust. “When one party has
confidence in an exchange partner’s reliability and integrity” (Ibid.) a relationship
between a provider and a customer can be built on trust. “In the relationship development
[trust] provides a vantage point for unifying the research traditions on marketing channel
power and conflict” (Dwyer, Schurr & Oh 1987). Furthermore, trust in business
relationships is a consequence of “the expectation of consistently competent performance
from an exchange partner” (Sirdeshmukh, Singh & Sabol 2002).
2. Value Propositions in Service System Networks

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Traditional B2B and B2C value propositions for service offerings are premised on the
service provider convincing the customers that they will receive superior value at certain
cost in a competitive environment (Kwan, Hottum & Kieliszewski 2012). This is the case
both for business customers as well as for consumer customers.
2.1 Basic model – Service System World View
In recent decades, the business environment has become more global and complex, so
that service providers often have to construct a network of partners and/or contractors to
fulfill the service obligations as promised by their value propositions. Customers in turn
share service value more and more with their community through their own social value
propositions (Figure 1). Note that these stakeholders: customer, service provider,
partners, community (employees and stockholders – not shown in figure) live in a society
where laws and regulations govern the legality of the value propositions.
Figure 1: Value Co-Creation in Service System (based on Kwan & Min 2008)
2.2 Service System Network
In Figure 1 we showed a service system with its entities and stakeholders connected by
value propositions in their environment. In Figure 2 we expended on the notions of these
value propositions in a more complex network environment (Kwan & Yuan 2011). The
focal relationship in the network is of course between the service provider and the
customer. The service provider could in turn decompose the value proposition with the
customer into its components and have the promised service experience fulfilled by
subcontractors in his partner network. This transaction requires the exchange of
reciprocal value propositions between the service provider and its partners (denoted as
and in Figure 2). This is the primary focus of this research. The value
proposition between the customer and his social network will receive more treatment
in a future project.

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Figure 2: Service System Network (based on Kwan & Yuan 2011)
2.3 Formal model of Value Propositions
A customer looking for service may be confronted with many Value Propositions ( )
(Kwan & Müller-Gorchs 2011). Each is made up of a vector of attributes offered by a
Service Provider (SP)1
:
= [ SE, B, C, P, Q, Sc, R, M ] [1]
where,
SE Service Experience offered by SP
B Benefits to be received by the customer
C Costs of service
P Probability of successfully performing the service
Q Quality of service
Sc Schema of data exchange between service provider and customer
R Rules of behavior for service provider and customer
M Metric with which the service is to be evaluation
A narrative of a Value Proposition with such a structure could be presented in the
following manner:
“Our service will provide such and such an experience which will result in certain
benefits to you. It will cost X. We have a good reputation and will be capable to

1
For simplicity, we will continue this development with to represent the one chosen by the customer
among the competition and/or substitute product/services.

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perform the service successfully and with high quality. We will exchange data
about each other in a particular format. We will perform the service based on the
agreeable upon criteria and you will also be expected to perform in a certain
manner in order to co-create value as intended. You will be able to measure our
performance and vice versa.”
A customer will evaluate (among choices) the “worth” of a Value Proposition based on
alignment among his value system, needs and wants, with what is being offered to
potentially reap (Value = Benefits – Costs) when the service is completed. Ng (2013)
talks about “worth” as a point-in-time decision about what one is willing to pay (“the
price”) for something, and “value” as a subjective, context-specific feeling of “goodness”
at a later time.
3. Model of Value Propositions based on B2X2Y scenarios
3.1 Basic model
In this section we will discuss constellations of service system networks. In these
scenarios, providers define Value Propositions towards customers and their related
service systems, which could be a business customer’s customer or a consumer
customer’s community. For the provider and his initial Value Proposition it is often not
obvious which service system network is addressable beyond his direct service system’s
partners (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Limited perspective of providers in service constellations
The opportunities, which are lying beyond the direct connection of the provider, are
difficult to perceive and address. Limited information about the direct interaction partners
and uncertainty about their further resources and service system networks are some of the
reasons.

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3.2 Constructing Value Propositions
Value Propositions among stakeholders could be very diverse and complex. We propose
the decomposition of a Value Proposition into three parts – the initiating stakeholder, the
receiving stakeholder, and value dimensions. The stakeholders are: Service Provider,
Society, Community, Employees, Stockholders, Partners, and Customers. There can be
many value dimensions depending on the stakeholder’s culture, location in a particular
geographical region, educational background, religious beliefs, etc. Some possible value
dimensions are: Economic, Environmental, Functional, Political, Societal, Social,
Intrinsic, Hedonic, Spiritual, Cultural, Corporal, Emotional, Intellectual, and Familial.
The elements of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs could also be possible value dimensions
(Maslow 1943).
Figure 4: The variety of Value Propositions spanning value dimension vectors
For example, a Value Proposition from a Service Provider (initiating stakeholder)
towards the society (receiving stakeholder) on environmental issues (value dimension).
Every point in the spanned space among these three vectors (Figure 4) is a potential
component of a Value Proposition.
3.3 Outsourcing
The success of such service system networks depends on the alignment of Value
Propositions. Even if different parts of the service are offered by subcontractors or other
third parties, it is important that every involved provider delivers the service obligations
to the customers as promised and expected. If the linkages among provider, customer and
partners are broken, the customers will likely be dissatisfied with the level and quality of
service. This loss of information will have a direct influence on the service relationship
between the customer and the provider (and the provider’s service system network).
Looking more closely at an outsourcing scenario of a bank – the outsourcing partner
provides service to the customers of the bank. This provision is based on a contract

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between the outsourcing partner and the bank. The value proposition from the partner to
the provider is motivated by: “I will do this for your customers….” Furthermore the
bank may issue an RFP of the form : “Do this for my customers…” (Figure 5). Often
there is a disconnect with the bank’s customers due to misalignment of value propositions
and/or loss of linkage.
Figure 5: Value Proposition structure: Outsourcing
This type scenario is typical of services being outsourced to third parties. Anand et al.
(2012) described the business environment of Tata Consultancy Services, which has over
250,000 employees. They cited examples of companies, which had to deal with complex
services which were often incomplete, defective, non-standardized, poor articulation of
value, poor quality, etc. These companies sought help from Tata because “We could not
solve the problems so we outsource them and save on costs and efforts.” At outsourcing
companies, the services are performed by mass scale of people, quality varies because of
the people factor, people performed in shifts monotonous, repetitive work, resulting in
poor quality, and high attrition rate (NASSCOM2
cited as high as over 40%). It would be
unrealistic to expect alignment of values among the Provider, Partner, and Customer in
such a scenario and often result in frustrated, disenchanted, and lost customers.
3.4 Channel Partners
Cisco Systems, a telecommunication equipment manufacturer, sells its products and
services through channel partners (except direct sales to large customers such as Fortune
50). The service relationship (Figure 6) to the customers is based on a contract with
channel partners : “Sell this to my customers…” Often the channel partners are Value
Added Resellers (VAR) that bundle hardware, software, and services to sell as solutions.
Problems arise when there is a misalignment of value propositions between those
involved parties. This is apparent, for example, when channel partners are not

2
The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) is a trade association of
Indian Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.

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enthusiastic in selling certain services to the customers because they do not benefit
directly from them.
Figure 6: Value Proposition structure: Channel Partners
3.5 Outcome-based value propositions
Outcome-based value propositions are based on the business model that the provider gets
compensated based on how much the outcome of the customer could be improved.
Usually, the customer’s outcome is measured by some KPI – it is reflected by some
dimension of his value system. Within the customer’s service system network, this could
well be what the customer needs to improve his performance to serve his own customer
better (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Value Proposition structure: Outcome-based Contracting
Even though Figure 7 looks less involved than the other examples before. This is the
most difficult value proposition scenario to be considered. Many premier service
companies are under pressure from their customers to justify the premium they charge for
services that competitors are commoditizing. Often the global brand, capacity, historical
quality performance (cf. P and Q in [1]) are no longer the customer’s deciding factors.
The outcome-based value proposition is one way for such service providers to combat
commoditization. This requires the service provider to have a much more in-depth and
thorough understanding of the customer’s value system (e.g., KPI’s) as well as the way
he does business in order to offer a value proposition that would appeal to the customer
(see Figure 3). It could take the form of “I will provide such service to help you increase

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your revenue (or market share, etc.) and you will pay me based on the accomplishing of
such results.”
There are already many examples in industry that have been successful with such a model
(e.g., see Ng et al. 2012). For example, “flyable hours” of Rolls Royce jet engines; John
Deere’s service to farmers to increase their yields; BAE’s service contract with the
British Air Force for mission-ready military helicopters; UPS’ taking over the logistics
functions of customers; UL using IT to connect with their customer’s business practices
(Hickens 2012); etc. These successful examples are rare but the practice had been
garnering industry interest3
as service providers try to find new profitable business
models that are relatively risky in an increasingly complex, competitive, and global
environment.
3.6 Extending value beyond customers
Apple Computers sells products that empower the customers to connect and share value
with their friends and community. Apple addresses this with its emotional ads to
emphasize the social network of the customer (Figure 8) – his relationship to friends and
family. This is done by offering customers ubiquitous solutions for preserving and
improving the availability of emotional relationships.
Figure 8: Value Proposition structure: Extending Customer Value
3.7 Representation of B2X2Y
By looking on these different examples of multi-step service delivery, with value which
is co-created in different interactions within the considered service system networks –
one aspect is quite similar. Regardless of whether value is co-created with business or
consumer customers, there is always a service system network where value makes an
impact. Based on this insight, we recommend an approach, where this value evolving
service system is also part of the original service relationship.

3
For example, see the section on “Outcome-based Business” in IBM’s Global Technology Outlook 2012.
Retrieved May 6th
, 2013: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/isl/infoportal/GTO_2012_Booklet.pdf

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The patterns presented above: Outsourcing (Value Proposition: P2B2C), Channel Partners
(Value Proposition: B2P2C), Outcome-based Contracting (Value Proposition: B2C2C),
and Extending Customer Value (Value Proposition: B2C2C) – can be factorized into the
common form: B2X2Y where X and Y could be any type of participant in the service
network.
4. Value Propositions in a Service System Network
4.1 Derivation of Value Propositions
An enterprise can be viewed as a hierarchy of Value Propositions presented to its
stakeholders. Each Value Proposition at a lower (more micro) level should be derived
from one at a higher (more macro) level – without loss of essential information – and vice
versa. The Value Proposition, when accepted, in essence becomes a Service Level
Agreement (SLA). For example, a student chooses to enroll at a University based on its
Value Proposition (e.g., reputation, rigor, programs, environment, etc.) should expect to
enjoy the promised experience until he graduates (e.g., taking classes, staying in the
dormitory, participating in campus activities, etc.; see notion of “customer journey”
below.)
The subcontract for third/fourth party service provider should be derived from the
original Value Proposition without loss of essential information. Furthermore the
experience of the customer is cumulative as the sum of experience (quality,
completeness, etc.) from all the service episodes.
In this section we provide a theoretical model of loss-less derivation of Value
Propositions described above. Let’s consider the connections between the service
provider and its partners/subcontractors in a service system network (Figure 2) as an
“information system” in the classic sense. That is, a set of information structures that
facilitates “inquiry, communicating and deciding” (Marschak 1968). A service provider
will have to communicate the value proposition accepted by the customer to its
partners/subcontractors and so forth. This communication process is loss-less if essential
information is passed from initiator to receiver without loss of fidelity. We consider only
the essential information because in many situations not all components of the Value
Proposition needed to or desired to be communicated (e.g., pricing, competitive,
proprietary information, etc.) The essential information being communicated could be in
the form of shared records from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems or
in more formal B2B EDI transactions (e.g., see Kwan, McGrath & Lee 2008 for a
discussion of such a language - Universal Business Language for Services). Fidelity of
communicated information could be loss often not by deliberate means but by the effect
of “quasi-garbling”. That is, the information received may not be equivalent to the
information sent due to “noise”.
In section 2.3 we have defined SE as the Service Experience part of the Value
Proposition accepted by the customer. SE can be further partitioned into Service

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Components S such that SE ⊇ Si, i=1,…,M. These service components are to be
performed for the customer in the duration of the SE (e.g., by contract or SLA).
When a service provider subcontracts or work with a partner (or partners) to deliver the
service to the customer, these Sj’s are to be made known to the partner. These Sj’s are
messages in the communication process. For reasons of simplicity, we assume that part of
the communication process will also involve sending messages about the customer, i.e.,
the Sc (data schema) part of the Value Proposition.
Consider Se as the service experienced by the customer and Se ⊇ Sej, j=1,…,N. These Sej
represent events, i.e. evidence of service performance. Obviously both the service
provider and customer hope that SE = Se as promised and all the stakeholders are happy.
But more often than not SE ≠ Se and one or more parties are not satisfied/fulfilled. This
could be caused by various forms of service failure or miscommunication between the
Service Provider and its partners as to what was promised to the customer.
4.2 Service System Network as Information Systems
Take the case of a single partner that was subcontracted by the service provider to fulfill
the contract with the customer. Let the communication process be represented by η - that
is the “information system” being used to communicate SE to the partner. The process is
represented as Se = SE • η. This “information system” can be modeled as a M x N
Markovian matrix with S’s as rows and Se’s as columns.
For each element of the matrix, ηij = p(Si|Sej) ≥ 0 and Σj ηij = 1 for all S’s. That is,
conditional probability of the customer experienced Sej given the promise of Si. The ideal
situation of SE = Se is where η is an M x N identity matrix (all diagonal elements are
1’s). The less than ideal situation where “quasi-garbling” is present is where not all the
messages were communicated perfectly to the partner and the customer received less than
or none of the promised service experience (a common phenomenon in teams, see
Marschak & Radner 1972).
In the case of more than one partner, there are more chances of “quasi-garbling” and the
customer receives service experience farther from those promised. This is represented as
Se = S • η1• η2• …. ηK with K partners. Each “information system” could in turn
introduce more noise into the process. This is typical of a “customer service journey”
where the customer receives service from one or more service provider under one service
experience expectation (e.g., in health care, education, telecommunication, travel, etc.)
During the journey, the customer could receive service from multiple providers in
parallel (e.g., buying items from multiple vendors on Amazon.com in a single transaction
on Amazon.com; see example of university student above.) In this case, the service
experience from each vendor (in parallel) contributes to the overall experience of the
transaction. In another situation, the customer could be receiving service from multiple
providers in sequence. For example, using mobile phone in different cities or countries,
or visiting multiple medical offices for procedures based on a single referral. For an

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application of this “quasi-garbling” model to search services and more detailed
mathematical derivations, see Venkatsubramanyan & Kwan (2008).
A colleague4
used the following analogy to describe the quality of service in a customer
service journey:
“Consider a customer service journey as a bottle of good vintage wine. If you put
one drop of sewage into the wine, the whole bottle of wine becomes repugnant
and undrinkable. On the other hand, if you start with sewage, it will still be
sewage no matter how many bottles of good wine you pour into it.”
So why would a communication process between the service provider and its partners
create noise that could lead to less service or service failures? There are three common
reasons. First, the service provider and intervening partners might not want to pass on all
the information about the original and subsequent Value Proposition(s). This could be the
result of the contract being divided up into different pieces in the subcontracting process
and subcontractors do not need visibility of what others are contributing to the service
performance. Second, the service provider might deliberately leave out some components
of the Sc in the communication process due to proprietary information, intellectual
property safeguard, and customer confidentiality, etc. Third, the original service provider
sold off the subcontracts and as a result of further “flipping”5
, the customer is receiving
lower-quality service from a lower-cost provider.
4.3 Derivations and Derivatives
We use the term “derivation” to describe the way Service Providers divide up a Value
Proposition into components to be fulfilled by partners. Conceptually this process has a
lot of similarities with the creation of “derivatives” from financial instruments or assets.
A common view is that if a transaction can be modeled as “A + B” then A and B could be
broken apart and separately sold or subcontracted. For example, when a customer buys a
PC with service contract, the service contract is usually sold by the vendor to another
entity and the customer will receive service from the new participant. In another example,
consider the bundling and re-packaging of real estate mortgages sold as financial
instruments. A new bundle could be made up of mortgages from various packages from
previous transactions. This is similar to service providers packaging and re-packaging
service contracts and selling them to other partners/subcontractors for fulfillment. One of
the oft-cited contributing factors to the global financial crisis is the exposure of financial
institutions to so-called “toxic mortgages.” What happened was that when a financial
institution holds a failing mortgage from some previous transaction, it has very little
information as to its provenance and could not determine which other financial
institutions have exposure to this failure. That is, the holding institution could not
reconstruct the previous packages and trace the mortgage back to its history of holders
and allocate exposure to them. Thus the holding institution has to bear a hundred percent

4
This analogy is attributed to Dan Pritchett of Rearden Commerce.
5
“Flipping” is a term borrowed from the real estate market where the rights and privileges of a contract is
assigned to a third party in exchange for consideration.

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of the exposure. This led to the failure of quite a few large financial institutions around
the world and contributed to the precipitation of the global financial crisis6
.
In our case, the packaging and re-packaging (derivations) of service contracts (i.e.,
accepted Value Propositions with specified Service Experience - SE) sold to
partners/subcontractors have similar behavior in that information is lost along the way
and the customer did not receive the service experience as originally promised. (i.e., SE ≠
Se ).
4.4 Integration Quality Gap in a Service System Network
The concept of Service Quality Gaps provides a very practical method of defining,
analyzing, and managing service quality (Parasuraman et al. 1985 and Schneider & White
2004). The overall customer satisfaction gap can be viewed as the sum of the differences
between expected and perceived service attributed to market research, service design,
standards/training conformance, and communication). Researchers have also developed
validated instruments to measure gaps based on the dimensions of service quality
(Parasuraman et al. 1998, 2005). Freund & Kwan (2010) extended the concept of
perceived service quality to include the perspectives of both the service provider and the
customer in a value co-production and co-creation environment.
The works cited above provides a gap model, which is sufficient to describe the quality of
service delivered from a single service provider to a customer. In a service network
environment under consideration here, a customer could encounter multiple service
providers in his service journey. We propose the concept of an “Integration Quality Gap”
to describe the difference between the customer’s expected and perceived service quality
where multiple service providers are involved.
We use the term “Integration” to describe the quality gap here because it connotes the
result of putting things back together. That is, if all the service experiences from the
partners/subcontractors are integrated (put together), how does it compare to the original
service experience promised in the value proposition (i.e., SE ~Se)?
4.5. Maintaining Consistent Customer Experience
The proffered Value Proposition from the service provider creates the expectation of a
customer. The service provider should ensure the consistency and quality of the
customer’s experience even though the service is to be provided by partners and
subcontractors. There are two approaches:
• Derive “loss-less” Value Propositions for the partners/subcontractors. That is, the
Value Propositions for them (
€
VPP ’s) should contain essential components and
information such that the promises made to the customer in
€
VPC are not affected

6
Thanks to Dr. Frank Jones, finance professor at the College of Business, San José State University for an
educational conversation about the topic. See recent developments in (Rappaport 2013).

14

by communication noise or loss. A mathematical analogy of this is that it should
be able to re-construct the original Value Proposition by summing all the sub-
Value Propositions together.
• The measurement of the quality of service to a customer should include
evaluation of the experience delivered by partners/subcontractors to form a
complete picture of the customer’s service journey. A mathematical analogy of
this is that the integration (in the calculus sense) of all the service episodes the
customer experienced should equal to the service experience promised (SE). In
other terms, the evaluation should include a measurement of the integration
quality gap.
These two approaches delineate the service provider’s responsibility in creating the
service system network environment to deliver the service for the customer (ex-ante) and
the subsequent evaluation of the quality of the delivered service (ex-post).
5. Conclusions and Future Research
In this paper we have made the following contributions. First, we extended Value
Propositions of the traditional business model of B2B and B2C to a B2X2Y model for a
service system network environment with multiple levels of service provider and
customer relationships. A formal model of a Value Proposition that incorporated
components of service experience, benefits, costs, quality, reputation, data schema, roles
and metrics was introduced. We also discussed the composition of Value Propositions
among stakeholders that span the space of multiple value dimensions. We illustrated the
B2X2Y model emphasizing the need to take into consideration the value systems of a
customer’s customer by the service provider with examples from outsourcing, channel
partners, outcome-based contracting, and value sharing in a social community.
Second, we put forth a model of the derivation of a hierarchy of Value Propositions in a
service system network environment where the service delivery is relegated to
subcontractors/partners. The model was based on the concept of a classic communication
process in an information system network where noise could be introduced, deliberately
or inadvertently, such that the fidelity of information was affected by “quasi-garbling” or
even loss. This resulted in the customer not receiving components of the service or
quality of service in his journey as promised by the original Value Proposition.
Third, we proposed an integration quality gap as a measure of service quality (difference
between expected and perceived) in a service system network environment as an addition
to the traditional service quality gaps.
In our discussion of the B2X2Y model in this paper we have focused on the service
provider and customer relationship. One of the next steps in this research is to incorporate
the customer and his social network side of the relationship in the model (see Figure 2).
In addition to understanding the customer’s value systems, the service provider also

15

needs to under the value systems of the customer’s social network and community since
the customers are increasingly demanding the ability (and functionalities) to share
received value with others. That is, the service provider must present a compelling story
with the
€
VPS in a B2C2S (Business to Consumer to Social) scenario.
Another direction of our future research is motivated by the ex-ante and ex-post
approaches to maintaining consistent customer experience discussed in section 4.5 above.
This will include the mathematical modeling of the “loss-less” derivation of Value
Propositions with illustrative examples. We will also work on the evaluation of service
quality in a service system network environment where a customer’s service journey
could involve encountering multiple providers in a single service episode or in multiple
service episodes over time. We will develop the concept of the integration quality gap
further to take into consideration of both types of interaction (we characterized these as
vertical vs. horizontal interactions). We will also develop the evaluation methodology for
the integration quality gap along the same line of traditional service quality gaps as
measured by established instruments such as SERVQUAL and E-S-QUAL.
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