CANCELLED: Seminar – Proactive Customer Service: Operational and Economic Analysis

Due to unforeseen circumstances this seminar has been cancelled. Sorry for any inconvenience caused; we hope to reschedule this.

Dr Tolga Tezcan, London Business School

This seminar focuses on the study of a service setting where the provider may have advance information about customers’ future service needs and may initiate service for these customers proactively. Information about future customer service needs is becoming increasingly available due to better system integration coupled with advanced analytics and Big Data methods. To study this setting, the research combines (i) queueing theory, and in particular a diffusion approximation developed specifically for this problem, to quantify the impact of proactive service on customer delays with (ii) game theory to investigate the incentives of customers to agree to be served proactively. Findings show that proactive service reduces average delays, and we develop a closed-form approximation that shows that the benefit of proactive service is increasing concave in the proportion of customers who can be served proactively. Nevertheless, the study finds that in equilibrium, customers are less willing to agree to be served proactively compared to social optimum because of a positive externality leading to free riding behaviour, customers who agree to be served proactively reduce the waiting time for everyone, including those customers who do not have to suffer the inconvenience of being served proactively. The results suggest that proactive service may have a large operational benefit, but caution that it may fail to fulfil its potential due to customer self-interested behaviour.

Joint work with Kraig Delana and Nicos Savva.

Speaker bio

Dr Tolga Tezcan is an Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations at London Business School. He teaches courses in Data Mining and Business Analytics. Prior to joining LBS, he was a faculty member at Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester between 2010 and 2015, where he was placed in the teaching honour roll in 2014, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign between 2006 and 2010.

Tolga holds a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering and an MS in Mathematics from Georgia Tech, an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Colorado State-Pueblo, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. Tolga’s research focuses on the robust management of service systems, such as customer service centres and healthcare systems, under uncertainty. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Annals of Applied Probability. He has received the Career Award from National Science Foundation (NSF) USA in 2010.