Mahei Li

Customer support service employees are facing an increased workload, while artificial intelligence (AI) appears to possess the potential to change the way we work. With the advent of modern types of generative AI, new opportunities to augment frontline service employees have emerged. However, little is known about how to integrate generative AI in customer support service organizations and purposefully change service employee work routines. Following multi-method qualitative research, we performed a literature review, conducted workshops, and interviewed IT support agents, managers, and AI experts. Thereby, we examine AI augmentation for frontline service employees in the context of IT support to carve out where and how GenAI can be leveraged to develop more efficient and higher-quality customer support. Our resulting framework reveals that especially adapting solutions and retaining knowledge is subject to a high degree of AI augmentation.

Due to the advent of digitization, service innovation has become even more important for both business and service research alike. Current service systems engineering approaches have employed a recombinant perspective that follows innovation mechanisms to leverage existing company resources for new service innovations. Employing these innovation mechanisms is still challenging, since there is little support on how to structure and identify these mechanisms. We propose a model-based service system engineering approach to structure existing resources into one formal model, enabling the formalization of service innovation mechanisms. The formalized service innovation mechanisms allow for a graphical illustration and enable future research to apply functions to analyze how innovation impacts entire or specific parts of service systems. Furthermore, the mathematical model enables an object-oriented value-driven perspective on service systems and is basis for graphical software tools. We contribute to literature by formalizing service innovations and its mechanisms in the context of service systems and by combining concepts of service innovation and service systems engineering. We do so by a) formalizing service innovation mechanisms and b) demonstrating the application of formal service innovations along one specific software implementation case. For practice, the service system model can with simulating the effects of service innovations.

With the rapidly increasing number and complexity of service demands, service providers need to become even more flexible and faster. To accommodate this, the service system needs to dynamically reconfigure its required resourced based on the context of both service providers and the customer. The resulting chosen service system configuration is called a dynamic solution. Our research question is therefore as follow: How can we implement the characteristic of dynamic solutions based on the service system model (SSM)? We demonstrate our model using a real-life citizen-based produce delivery service. We contribute by being able to quantify service system configurations and compare different configurations dynamically. Keywords: Service operations, operationalizing