A review of service quality and service delivery: Towards a customer co-production and customer-integration approach

© 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers with an overview of the service quality and delivery domain, focussing on the inclusion of customer co-production and customer integration. Specifically, this paper concentrates on service quality (including quality measurement), the service environment, controls and their consequences. Design/methodology/approach: A comprehensive review of the literature is conducted, analysed and presented. Findings: The review shows that service delivery is both complex and challenging, particularly when considering the unique characteristics of services and the high level of customer involvement in their creation. The facilitation, transformation and usage framework identifies how failures can occur at each stage of service delivery, beginning with the characteristics of the service environment, while control theory offers insights into the formal and informal controls that may be applied in the facilitation and transformation stages, which may reduce the likelihood or extent of such failures. Originality/value: Despite the fact that it is widely accepted that service quality is an antecedent to customer satisfaction, it is surprising that this customer co-creation aspect has been largely neglected in the extant literature. As such, the role that customer co-production plays in service quality performance has been examined in this paper. It is hoped that this examination will enhance both theoretical and practical understanding of service quality. It would be useful to find modern tools that can help in improving service quality performance

A design of a multi-agent recommendation system using ontologies and rule-based reasoning: pandemic context

Learners attend their courses in remote or hybrid systems find it difficult to follow one size fits all courses. These difficulties have increased with the pandemic, lockdown, and the stress they cause. Hence, the role of adaptive systems to recommend personalized learning resources according to the learner's profile. The purpose of this paper is to design a system for recommending learning objects according learner's condition, including his mental state, his COVID-19 history, as well as his social situation and ability to connect to the e-learning system on a regular basis. In this article, we present an architecture of a recommendation system for personalized learning objects based on ontologies and on rule-based reasoning, and we will also describe the inference rules required for the adaptation of the educational content to the needs of the learners, taking into account the learner’s health and mental state, as well as his social situation. The system designed, and validated using the unified modeling language (UML). It additionally allows teachers to have a holistic view of learners’ progress and situations

The Social Competence of Homeschooled and Conventionally-Schooled Adolescents: A Preliminary Investigation

Homeschooling is a controversial educational option that has grown dramatically during the past two decades. Socialization concerns contribute strongly to this controversy. Research in this area is sparse, but it indicates that homeschooled students do well academically and socially. Many homeschooling studies suffer, however, from serious methodological issues. This investigation sought to discover whether differences in social competence existed between sample populations of homeschooled and conventionally-schooled students; research in the arena of competence and resilience served to guide the methodology. Where differences were found, specifics were elucidated and factors contributing to these differences were isolated. Forty-seven homeschooling and conventionally-schooling families participated (N = 47). Parents completed the Family Characteristics questionnaire, the parent version of the Social Involvement Report (SIR-P), and the Parent Rating Scales (PRS) which is part of the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC). The students completed the adolescent version of the SIR (SIR-P), the Self-Report of Personality (SRP) of the BASC, and a Friendship Task. Teachers provided information on thirty-two students by completing the Teacher Rating Scales (TRS) of the BASC. Results indicated that there were differences in the social competence of homeschooled and conventionally-schooled adolescents, particularly on the BASC scales. Mean scores on the PRS and TRS for homeschooled and conventionally-schooled students were in the average range on all adaptive and maladaptive scales, but homeschooled students were consistently rated higher on measures of social skills and on measures that support academic competence. Ratings for conventionally-schooled students were consistently higher on measures of school and social maladjustment. The significantly different family characteristics of homeschooling and conventionally-schooling families impacted several of the research findings. Parental employment status, family structure, father\u27s education, and religious involvement were factors that were particularly influential. Adolescents from complex step-families where parents worked full-time had the highest scores on measures of maladjustment. This study represented a strong first step towards increasing the available information concerning homeschooling and its impact on social competence. Additional studies are needed to further explore the development of competence in both homeschool and conventional school settings to understand the impact of educational environments on the development of social competence