I found and reviewed the article The new age of customer impatience: An agenda for reawakening logistics customer service research. This article is a peer reviewed article that explains the need for further research in logistics customer service. When reviewing this article I found a few things that made me question some of the research. The first item was a quote the author used to describe and define what logistics customer service was. Here is the quote, “In times of tough competition when many organizations offer similar products in terms of price, features, and quality, customer service differentiation can provide an organization with a distinct advantage over the competition.” (Lambert et al., 1998, p. 40). While this quote is accurate, I found that the quote is very general in nature when it is referencing customer service. The author used this quote to refer that the original person to say that, Lambert, was saying this in reference to logistics customer service. I took the quote as customer service as a whole is what provides the differentiation, not solely the logistics side of the equation. The authors then go on to use Lambert’s name saying that his “quote embodies the nature of academic research in the 1990s that recognized LCS as an intangible commodity” (Daugherty et al., 2019). Again, on the surface it appears that the author spun Lambert’s original quote fit the narrative that additional research is needed when it comes to logistics customer service. The other issue that I questioned was the authors depth of research. The only reason I say this is because they talk about how there is limited new research and that there is a need for new research related to logistics customer service but often reference article that were published in 2018. I think there may be a bias present, although very subtle, when they are wanting to point the research in the specific direction of customer impatience. The reason I say this is because of the wording they use when they stated “We introduce the concept of customer impatience and offer suggestions for specific LCS-related research topics. We suggest particular attention be given to the concept of customer impatience and the implications for customer service” (Daugherty et al., 2019). Initially, they called for more research overall, but then wanted to just focus on research related to their concept. This is just my initial thoughts on the article and I would need to review all of the source material in order to provide an 100% accurate assessment.
Daugherty, P., Bolumole, Y., & Grawe, S. (2019). The new age of customer impatience An agenda for reawakening logistics customer service research. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 49(1), 4–33. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy1.apus.edu/10.1108/IJPDLM-03-2018-0143