Prof. Boo Ho Voon, Universiti Teknologi MARA Sarawak, Malaysia

Prof. Dr. Voon is a professor of marketing at Universiti Teknologi MARA Sarawak, Malaysia. He is an experienced researcher who has published many papers and a few books in service management and marketing, strategic value-chain, and educational administration research. His book chapter on ‘Confucian values for service excellence’ can provide strategic insights. He has years of experience in education and banking in Sarawak before joining the academia. He teaches various strategic marketing and research methodology courses as well as supervised learners at bachelor degree and postgraduate levels. His innovations such as ServEx, BEHAVE, BLUE-SEA, eDioms (Chinese Marketing), Marketing Research MOOC and MyServEx system have won prestigious awards locally and internationally. MyServEx is commercialized. His consultancy projects on service management, customer experience and product development have helped the clients, and Sarawak government. His current research projects include socio-economic development service, rehabilitation service excellence, and personal service attitudes.

 

 

Towards Sustainable Community-based Rehabilitation Service: Co-creating Values for the Special People

 

ABSTRACT

 

Co-creating rehabilitation services and sustaining the excellent caring service to serve the persons with disability (PwD) will be very challenging if there is lack of support from the relevant stakeholders (e.g., staff, trainers, parents/guardians, trainees). The quality of rehabilitation service needs to be consistently and continuously emphasized. Therefore, service excellence culture of the community-based rehabilitation (CBR) centers is imperative to ensure the superior service quality to the CBR trainees. This paper aims to share the empirical research findings based on focus group discussions and thereafter the nation-wide questionnaire survey to develop a trainee-oriented rehabilitation service management model with the intended co-value creation. In the qualitative phase, the group discussion participants were the CBR center managers, trainers, and parents. The group discussions and interviews analyzed accordingly to generate the meaningful themes and their respective items. These items were used for the quantitative questionnaire survey research phase. There were 6 dimensions and 38 items of rehabilitation service excellence culture (RehabServE) namely: Trainee orientation, Competitor orientation, Inter-functional coordination, Excellence-driven, Long-term focus, and Employee orientation. The multi-item measures were found to be reliable and valid as well as practically useful for service management of the CBR centers. A RehabServE scale was developed and validated accordingly with the nation-wide questionnaire survey data (n=1029). The measurement would be useful to monitor and support the community-based rehabilitation service excellence from the parents’/guardian’s perspective. RehabServE promotes and practice sustainable rehabilitation service to co-serve the persons with disabilities for better quality of life and happiness.      

 

Keywords. Community-based rehabilitation; service excellence culture.