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Focuses on the roles of customers in creating quality and productivity in service experiences. Presents two conceptual frameworks to aid managerial understanding and focus research efforts on customer participation. The first framework captures levels of customer participation across different types of services. The second discusses three major roles of customers in the service delivery process. Two examples of the concepts are presented ‐ one in a weight loss context and the other in a mammography screening setting. Both are based on empirical research and illustrate specific applications of customers’ roles in creating the service experience.

Boundary‐spanning personnel such as tax preparers, travel agents and hairdressers interface directly with customers. In their unique position, between the organization and customer, these service providers market the service to consumers while they simultaneously carry out operational functions. Both the customer and the provider bring certain expectations to the service encounter. These expectations then shape the perceptions of the service encounter. The research reported uses script methodology to compare the expectations between boundary‐spanning service providers and consumers of the same service. Draws its theoretical foundation from the expectations and scripts literatures. In Phase One, scripts of the service were elicited in order to test hypotheses based on the discovery and comparison of consumers′ and service providers′ subgoals for a typical service encounter (H1). A hypothesis also tested the point at which providers and consumers enter their respective scripts of a typical service encounter (H2 ). In Phase Two, the subgoals mentioned most frequently in Phase One were used as stimuli to elicit the specific actions which comprise the complete script. These complete scripts enabled a comparison of the elaborateness of provider and consumer scripts (H3). The results of Phase One revealed that a portion of consumers′ subgoals for a service encounter are shared by providers of the service while other subgoals are unique, supporting H1. The point of activation of the script differed dramatically between customers and providers, supporting H2. The Phase Two findings provide support for the hypothesis that service providers have more elaborate scripts. Overall, the results support the notion that scripts operationalize expectations. Closes with implications for management and suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of health-care service quality (HCSQ) dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions in selected corporate hospitals from South India.

Based on Parasuraman et al.’s SERVQUAL variables, the study tried to identify the effects of each variable to patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions. Data were collected through systematic random sampling among 500 in-patients of corporate hospitals with minimum four days stay were considered for the in-patients’ sample. Structural equation modelling technique was used to investigate the effect of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention.

The findings suggest that in addition to “patient satisfaction”, the only HCSQ dimension that directly affects behavioural intention is “empathy”. In addition, “empathy” affects “responsiveness”, “assurance” and “tangibles” which, in turn, have only an indirect effect to behavioural intention through “patient satisfaction”.

This research investigated the HCSQ dimensions effects on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention from the perspective of patients and corporate hospitals run by the private players. This paper contributes to the body of academic knowledge by shedding more light into the role of HCSQ dimensions, and especially “empathy”, in the intentions for corporate hospital patients.

An understanding of the direct and indirect effect of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intentions is important to corporate hospital marketing managers because it offers them the opportunity to take certain actions for improving patients’ satisfaction and these actions increase their intention to revisit.

The paper manages to investigate the effects of HCSQ dimensions on patient satisfaction and behavioural intention, especially in the health-care marketing sector.

Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.

Using the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, I argue that the catastrophe was less an example of a low probability-high catastrophe event than an instance of socially produced risks and insecurities associated with deepwater oil and gas production during the neoliberal period after 1980. The disaster exposes the deadly intersection of the aggressive enclosure of a new technologically risky resource frontier (the deepwater continental shelf) with what I call a frontier of neoliberalized risk, a lethal product of cut-throat corporate cost-cutting, the collapse of government oversight and regulatory authority and the deepening financialization and securitization of the oil market. These two local pockets of socially produced risk and wrecklessness have come to exceed the capabilities of what passes as risk management and energy security. In this sense, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was produced by a set of structural conditions, a sort of rogue capitalism, not unlike those which precipitated the financial meltdown of 2008. The forms of accumulation unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico over three decades rendered a high-risk enterprise yet more risky, all the while accumulating insecurities and radical uncertainties which made the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon type disaster highly overdetermined.

The purpose of this paper is to determine consumer perceptions of service quality in wet markets and supermarkets in Hong Kong.

A questionnaire was developed and distributed via a convenience sample to consumers in shopping malls in Causeway Bay, Mong Kok and Tsuen Wan.

The study finds that supermarkets outperformed wet markets across all aspects of service quality as measured by SERVQUAL‐P.

Implications suggest that wet market vendors are not providing the level of service quality demanded by their customers. In particular, findings suggest that wet market vendors need to improve the visual attractiveness of their stalls, work on making them look more professional and start using more modern equipment.

Wet market vendors in conjunction with government representatives need to develop standards of service quality for wet markets across Hong Kong. This is imperative if the wet market model is to survive in what is a highly competitive food retailing industry. Without action, it appears that the supermarketization of the Hong Kong food retailing industry will continue unabated.

This paper adds to a small but growing research stream examining service quality in the food retailing industry in Hong Kong. It provides empirical results that guide suggested actions for change.