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Contrary to want-based services, customer participation has got lesser attention in high-credence services like health care. Customer participation for patients with chronic illnesses could be life-threatening and goes beyond the service organization’s physical environment. Realizing the importance of transformative service research in health-care services, this study aims to propose and validate the conceptualization of customer participation for patients with chronic illnesses.

The study uses sequential exploratory research design with mixed method research. The first phase is a qualitative exploration of the nature and meaning of customer participation by synthesizing theory and insights from semi-structured interviews (N = 75) with doctors, patients and paramedical staff. Next, survey data (N = 690) of patients with chronic illnesses is used to validate the proposed conceptualization. Finally, nomological validity was also tested on an additional survey data set (N = 362) using SEM and FsQCA.

The findings reveal that health-care customer participation is a three-dimensional behavioral construct in which a customer can participate by sharing information, involving in decision-making and ensuring compliance. The study also demonstrates that customer participation is a critical driver of satisfaction with life and perceived control on illness.

The research provides policy guidelines for owners and operators of health-care organizations in developing frameworks for collecting participation data, which can be used in strategies for seeking customer participation.

The research conceptualizes and validates “customer participation” as a multidimensional higher-order construct for patients with chronic illnesses, rarely focused in services marketing and management research on health care.

The purpose of this study is to examine how servicescapes impact well-being and satisfaction of both hospital customers (patients) and health care professional service providers.

The study investigates how a hospital servicescape impacts two critical outcomes – well-being and satisfaction – of both hospital patients (customers) and health care professionals, who are immersed in that environment.

The hospital servicescape had a greater impact on physical, psychological and existential well-being for professionals than for patients. However, the reverse was true for satisfaction. The new servicescape enhanced the satisfaction and physical and psychological well-being of professionals but only the satisfaction of customers.

The study implications for health care policy suggest that investment in health care-built environments should balance the needs of health care professionals with those of customers to benefit their collective well-being and satisfaction.

Based on the findings, the authors propose that servicescape investments should focus on satisfying the physical needs of patients while also placing emphasis on the psychological needs of professionals.

Health care spending on physical facilities should incorporate careful cost-benefit analysis, ensuring that beneficial features for both user groups are included in new hospital designs, omitting features that are less supportive of well-being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to compare the impact of the same real-life servicescape on the satisfaction of both customers and service providers (professionals) and considers the critical health outcome of well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how need for service, enabling factors and pre-disposing characteristics influences access to service. In addition, the authors seek to examine the moderating influence of pre-disposing variables on the relationship between insurance and health services utilization.

The authors utilize data from a major metropolitan hospital in the USA to test and extend the behavioral model of health care.

Results indicate that insurance and pre-disposing variables have a direct impact on type of health service utilization. However, the insurance effect is found to vary by demographic factors.

This paper is limited to secondary data. Future work can incorporate both attitudinal and behavioral measures to obtain a more comprehensive evaluation of services access.

The research offers a tactical framework for management to segment consumer markets more effectively.

Through the framework, management will have the requisite knowledge to target segmented populations based on need, insurance, and pre-disposing variables which will help improve access to services and clinical outcome.

The findings of this paper will serve as a basis for future research exploring the influence of insurance on access to services.

Describes the efforts of Avis to provide monthly progress reports to the individual offices and departments who delivered the service, through their Customer Care Income Statements, allowing their efforts to improving customer care to be seen immediately. Creates a sensitivity analysis to show which major areas of concentration will bring the most return. Asserts that soliciting customer opinion is an excellent public image device. Concludes that customer care must be treated as a going concern ‐ something that requires constant attention and commitment and makes profit over time.

Recent literature within public service logic has called for more explicit conceptualisation of customer value in public services. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how the customer value approach can be applied in the management of public health care services.

This study is a qualitative case study of management of public health care services in Finland. The authors interviewed 17 regional health care service developers and analyzed the interview data using thematic analysis.

The study suggests five propositions for applying customer value approach from the marketing literature in public health care service management. The study enables a deeper understanding of customer value creation in this context and improvement of public health care services.

This study contributes to the public management research in general and public service logic research in particular by suggesting what constitutes customer value in public health care services.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the antecedents and outcomes of internal service quality (ISQ) in a health-care environment. The relationships among the heterogeneous health-care environment, coordinated care, perceived organisational support (POS), ISQ, internal customer satisfaction and patient-centred care were explored.

Based on a review of the literature, a structural model was developed. A 37-item questionnaire was circulated among service providers in the health-care system, including doctors, nurses and system staff, all over India. The random sampling method was adopted to collect data. A total of 238 valid responses were received. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The results show that the heterogeneous environment, coordinated care and POS act as antecedents of ISQ, which drives internal customer satisfaction and patient centricity in health care.

The paper contributes to the health-care literature by identifying the antecedents and consequences of ISQ and developing a structural relationship among ISQ, the heterogeneous health-care environment, coordinated care, POS, internal customer satisfaction and patient-centred care.

Hospital administrators may use various constructs of POS, ISQ and coordinated care to measure process and employee performance, which may aid the design of appropriate processes and improve employee selection. The constructs of patient centricity and internal customer satisfaction may be used as benchmarking tools to facilitate the formulation of immediate corrective actions and policies for future courses of action.

This paper highlights how patient centricity may be achieved by focussing on ISQ, coordinated care processes and a facilitative internal environment. This understanding may aid the design of processes that in turn deliver health as a social good in an effective manner.

This paper extends past research on ISQ by showing that ISQ affects internal customer satisfaction and, in turn, the quality of service delivery in the system. In the health-care context, heterogeneity in patient needs, coordinated care and organisational support play crucial roles in determining ISQ, which in turn influences the level of patient-centred care.

The formation and spreading of market‐, management‐ and individual‐rights discourses into society, as well as the movement of consumerism, have paved the way for a transformation of the linguistic usage. The transformation suggests that the view of the care seeker has shifted from a waiting patient, via a consumer to a customer creating value. Another example of the process is that the former medical meeting between patient/doctor now is described as a service meeting. With this background, the purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of linguistic usage and to analyse the performativity of the service management discourse in health care.

The concept of performativity (Butler) supported with discursive formation and subjectivization (Foucualt) is used as theoretical framework. The performativity of the discourse is understood as a vehicle within the discourse, which influences people on an ontological level that names and makes them active subjects in line with what the discourse is saying.

When the service management discourse travels into the world of health care, discursive tensions between medical‐, care‐ and management discourses follow. These become apparent in the distinction between the different discursive constructions of patient – related to passivity, and customer – related to the performative image of active participation in value creating health. Even if the customer in service management discourse is imagined as an agent for himself with power and individual responsibility it is doubtful if people view themselves as customers. The dialectics between the use of the customer concept in commercial service meetings and the patient – doctor meeting, which is illustrated, point to unexpressed and implicit presumptions of an ontological kind in the ways service management researchers describe service meetings. Recent health care research can be interpreted as if a majority of patients have a desire to be part of their value creating processes. Since the responsibilities and tasks of the professions in health care however are regulated by law and institutionalised, the process of delegating tasks to patients seems not to be a matter of course.

It seems to be problematic to replace the patient concept with the customer concept in general. This concept gives hardly much room for the vulnerability that characterises a sick person. A reasonable approach would of course be to use the customer concept in a nuanced way.

The paper demonstrates that the performativity of service management theories, through the use of discursive analysis, is valuable in order to understand shifts in linguistic usage.

This paper aims to clarify the interdependencies among three main stakeholder groups and to show how to manage overall service quality in customer care centers.

A framework of the relations among the target groups of a customer care center was developed. A survey methodology with a 360° approach that encompasses top management, employees and final customers as three main target groups was conducted. The sample incorporates 58 customer care centers and seven industries in Germany and Austria. Besides the management interviews, we received 1,580 completed questionnaires by employees, and 2,010 completed questionnaires by customers. Multiple regression analysis was applied on multi‐item measurement scales of the three different levels.

We were able to show that employee satisfaction is the main factor for driving customer orientation. Further management efforts resulting in employee orientation will facilitate the job of employees and increase employee loyalty.

Only 16 customer care centers participated in all three parts of the study.

Companies should consider the needs of their employees and possibly initiate measures to foster employee satisfaction. A strict quality orientation could signal a low level of trust toward the employees. It is essential that firms invest in their employees and apply an employee‐oriented management style.

The study encompasses three relevant stakeholder groups on a broad empirical base, which is unique until now in the research field of customer care centers. Interdependencies among the three perspectives could be revealed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore current marketing communication mixes (MCMs) in two industries, electronics home appliance stores (face-to-face interaction) and remote care (interface-mediated interaction), to propose marketing strategies from the perspective of service design and determine the relationships between service interaction patterns and MCMs in the pre-service phase.

Six industry experts in marketing were interviewed through semi-structured interviews, the topic of which focused on the details of five MCMs and their correlations were analyzed using a customer journey maps. Finally, the MCMs were further explored to verify differences in attractiveness to customers, respectively.

The result showed that the most attractive activity for the electronics home appliance stores customer is the promotion. And the four face-to-face service interaction patterns and MCMs exhibited a low correlation. In addition, the customers of remote care service argued that the personnel selling was the most attractive MCMs to them. For customers who utilize smart devices to communicate with advertisement exhibited the highest correlation coefficient.

The limitation of this study is that the research only conducts interview research on two service industries.

This study was expected to develop improved marketing communication strategies to remedy the sales predicament induced by virtual channels and to increase people’s acceptance of remote care service.

The value of this paper is to analyze the correlation and difference of MCMs and service interaction patterns between electronics home appliance stores and remote care, and propose a structural model of MCMs for two different industries.

This study examines how modular interfaces manifest in multi-provider contexts and how they can improve coordination and customization of services. The aim of the study is to describe interfaces in multi-provider contexts and elaborate on how they support the delivery of integrated patient care.

A qualitative, multiple case study was conducted in two multi-provider contexts in healthcare services: one representing paediatric Down syndrome care in the Netherlands and one representing home care for the elderly in Finland. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews in both contexts.

This study provides insight into several types of interfaces and their role in multi-provider contexts. Several inter- and intra-organizational situations were identified in which the delivery of integrated patient care was jeopardized. This study describes how interfaces can help to alleviate these situations.

This study deepens the understanding of interfaces in service modularity by describing interfaces in multi-provider contexts. The multi-provider contexts studied inspired to incorporate the inter-organizational aspect into the literature on interfaces in service modularity. This study further develops the typology for interfaces in modular services by adding a third dimension to the typology, that is, the orientation of interfaces.