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The purpose of this paper is to challenge service researchers to design for service inclusion, with an overall goal of achieving inclusion by 2050. The authors present service inclusion as an egalitarian system that provides customers with fair access to a service, fair treatment during a service and fair opportunity to exit a service.

Building on transformative service research, a transformative, human-centered approach to service design is proposed to foster service inclusion and to provide a platform for managerial action. This conceptual study explores the history of service exclusion and examines contemporary demographic trends that suggest the possibility of worsening service exclusion for consumers worldwide.

Service inclusion represents a paradigm shift to higher levels of understanding of service systems and their fundamental role in human well-being. The authors argue that focused design for service inclusion is necessary to make service systems more egalitarian.

The authors propose four pillars of service inclusion: enabling opportunity, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness.

Service organizations are encouraged to design their offerings in a manner that promotes inclusion and permits customers to realize value.

This comprehensive research agenda challenges service scholars to use design to create inclusive service systems worldwide by the year 2050. The authors establish the moral imperative of design for service inclusion.

Studies on call centres suggest that there is a focus on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness, where effectiveness is indicated by characteristics such as customer orientation, service priorities and quality. It therefore appears that customers will expect and experience low levels of service quality from call centres, with possible implications for their loyalty to the providing organisation. These issues are the focus of this study. A mail survey was conducted of recent clients of two call centres in Australia. The respondents were individual consumers in an insurance company (n = 284, 14 per cent) or business customers of a bank (n = 325, 16 per cent). Key findings are similar for the two samples. Both perceptions of quality and customer orientation of the call centre were related to loyalty to the providing organisation, and perceptions of quality partially mediated the customer orientation to loyalty relationship. The discussion includes managerial implications and potential future research.

This paper aims to report on a study that investigated employees' views on the organizational factors that affect their ability to deliver service quality to customers. The study is important because call centers represent unique work environments and they have not been used in the development of service quality theory.

Ten focus groups of frontline employees who work in a telecommunications call center in Australia were conducted. Data were subjected to content analysis.

Nine major themes were identified. Some of these themes are evident in theory arising from service quality gaps, service climate, and service profit chain studies. Other themes include whether managers emphasize sales or efficiency, rather than service quality; approaches to performance monitoring and feedback, role and productivity demands, quality assurance regimes, and employees' experiences of service encounter stress.

The findings suggest that various factors from prior work need to be integrated and extended to enhance service quality in call centers. However, data were collected from only one call center.

The present study suggests that to deliver high levels of service quality, call center managers need to rethink their approaches to productivity and performance management, and hiring and supporting the “right” service staff.

This paper re‐examines service quality in the specific context of call centers. It provides an organizational focus and complements recent work that has tested the role of employee attitudes in service quality studies. The paper concludes with a model for testing.

Studies have demonstrated that the service climate in an organisation, as perceived by employees, is positively related to service quality, as perceived by customers. However, no studies appear to have tested the link to service quality from an employee perspective. Hence, the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between service climate, employee commitment and employees' service quality capability (SQC).

Data were collected by a cross‐sectional field study of frontline employees in a telecommunications call centre (n=167; 58 percent). A call centre was chosen because of the perceived poor service climate and the high levels of employee turnover.

Global service climate (GSC) in the call centre was found to be positively related to employees' SQC, with partial mediation by employee commitment. Regression analysis showed that three factors: managerial practices, customer feedback and human resource management contributed to GSC but, unexpectedly, customer orientation did not.

The findings indicate that the service climate in a call centre affects employees, both in terms of their commitment, and their self‐reported feelings about the delivery of service quality to customers. Unexpected findings suggest that further work on service climate in call centres is warranted.

This study demonstrates the important effects of service climate in general, and HRM in particular, on frontline employees in call centres. Managers should benefit from noting the links and the likely service quality outcome for customers.

This paper applies and extends theory developed in other contexts to call centres.

Reported studies on call centers emphasize efficiency and control, with possible implications for service priorities, customer orientation and service quality. However, there is little empirical research to test assumptions from the customer’s perspective. This study aimed to establish whether customers expected (predicted) low levels of service from a call center, how this level compared to the minimum level they considered adequate, and whether the perceived customer orientation of the call center was related to service quality expectations. Data were collected in Australia from two sources: end consumers (n = 289) of an insurance provider, and business customers (n = 325) of a bank. Key findings were similar for both samples. First, customers had very high levels of adequate (minimum) expectations, and adequate expectations behaved independently from predicted (forecast) expectations. Second, customer orientation was associated with predicted expectations but not adequate expectations. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research and managerial implications.

Examines the dimensions of service quality in the hospitality industry by extending the SERVQUAL scale to include eight new items that specifically pertain to the hospitality industry, subsequently referred to as HOLSERV. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed at five mid‐luxury hotels in Australia during July to October 1998 and a response rate of 15.5 per cent achieved. Key findings of the study are that service quality is represented by three dimensions in the hospitality industry, relating to employees (behaviour and appearance), tangibles and reliability, and the best predictor of overall service quality is the dimensions referred to as “employees”. The findings also show that the one‐column format questionnaire provides a valid and reliable, but much shorter, survey. The major implication for managers is that improvements in the behaviour and appearance of their employees is most likely to enhance consumer perceptions of service quality.

Studies in services management from the different perspectives of marketing, operations, human resources and psychology support the existence of a variety of links between organisations and their customers. The basic premise asserts that organisational characteristics and practices are linked to employee attitudes that are reflected in service quality outcomes, customer satisfaction and loyalty and, consequently, profit. Empirical studies support many of these associations and streams of research link them into linear sequences. However, the evidence is not unequivocal and this review challenges it by highlighting the complexity and non‐linearity of many of the proposed links, and the existence of reciprocity between certain variables. In synthesising the evidence in relation to the proposed links, the paper also identifies conceptual and methodological issues, unanswered questions and potential future research.

The increased use of contracting for service delivery involves new challenges in ensuring that quality is maintained. Performance monitoring involves both efficiency (costs) and effectiveness (quality) measures; however, there is little guidance from the literature to indicate the best approaches in different contexts. This paper therefore reports on an exploratory study in which approaches to performance monitoring, and respondents’ views on best practice, were explored in contracted services. Key findings are that organisations rely on inspections by their own employees or contractor checklists, but that these practices are in conflict with their views on best practice. However, the respondents agreed that performance monitoring has a large effect on quality outcomes. Using both the literature and the study, a model has been developed that provides managers with a framework for improving their performance and quality monitoring practices, and highlights areas for future academic research.

Using multiple theoretical lenses, the paper develops and empirically tests a service design-based framework of effective customer participation (CP) in service delivery. Particularly, the paper examines the impact of customer education on effective CP, besides the latter's effect on service quality. The direct and moderating effect of service modularity on the association between customer education and effective CP is also studied.

Covariance-based structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses using the survey data collected from the healthcare industry within Pakistan.

The results lend support for the presence of individual and mutually reinforcing effects of customer education and service modularity on effective CP in service delivery, ultimately affecting service quality.

Building on the CP and customer learning literature, this research extends the work on antecedents and consequences of effective CP in the larger domain of the service design and service delivery literature.

The findings reveal that service managers should design services such that by design, CP is ingrained within service delivery processes so that it is effectively managed during service delivery for superior service quality.

Given the already scant research that has either taken a narrower view of CP (mostly in pre- or post-service delivery), the current research makes one of the initial attempts to identify, theorize and empirically test the service design level antecedents for holistic CP spanning over the physical, behavioral and informational participation during the service delivery.