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Customer-intensive services refer to the service that a provider needs to invest in customers with high patience and experience. Within a certain rate range, the slower service rate and the longer service time, the higher customer’s utility; however, this may cause queue congestion. And the advertising of service provider will affect the revenue. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of advertising on the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of such service provider at different development stages.

This paper investigates the service strategies of service provider based on advertising effects. The authors first divide service provider into insufficient customers or sufficient customers according to the development stage, then analyze the impact of advertising at different stages. The authors focus on the formulation of the optimal price, service rate and the optimal revenue of service provider at different stages.

This paper finds that in the insufficient customers stage, the service provider’s strategy of “small profits but quick turnover” is conducive to quickly accumulating customers. With the development of service provider, the advertising indirectly increases the revenue of service provider by maintaining popularity. The result also shows that with the development of service provider, the initiative of such service market has gradually been mastered by service provider, from “buyer market” to “seller market.”

The finding provides an alternative explanation for the impact of advertising on service provider’s optimal strategies; it also solves the settings of service price and rate of customer-intensive service provider at different development stages. This study is essential to create the optimal revenue and solve supply–demand conflicts (such as doctor–patient conflict) between service provider and customers.

This paper aims to explore the role of frontline employees (FLEs) as mediators in transformative service processes within services targeting vulnerable users.

This paper is based on a case study of the development and implementation of a dementia village, and the data consist of documents, in-depth interviews and field observations.

The analysis identifies FLEs as mediators in six different roles. These roles highlight how FLEs perform as mediators, acting in between and for vulnerable users and thus supporting their well-being. Specifically, the roles explicate the mediating role of FLEs in the design and planning of transformative changes and in daily work practices.

The different mediating roles of FLEs presented here should inform care providers and managers of how employees can become assets for supporting vulnerable users’ well-being during the design and planning stages of transformative change and through daily service work.

This paper offers novel insights into the multifaceted roles of FLEs in transformative services. The findings add to the current debate on mediation in transformative services and contribute to the literature by extending and refining the established conceptual and empirical understandings of the role of transformative service mediators in consumers’ well-being.

This paper aims to investigate the optimal price and service rate decisions in a customer-intensive service, where customers’ perceived service quality decreases in the service speed. Customers are assumed to be forward-looking in purchase decision-making and heterogeneous in their reservation utilities. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of customers’ forward-looking behavior and the heterogeneity on the operational decisions in a customer-intensive context.

The service is delivered through an M/M/1 queue system with unobservable queues. Customers are forward-looking in queue joining decisions, where the purchase decisions are made when the expected utility is greater than the reservation utility. The optimal price and service rate decisions are analyzed with both homogeneous and heterogeneous customers, where homogenous customers have the same reservation utility in purchase decision-making, while heterogeneous customers have different reservation utilities, which are captured by a random variable.

The optimal price and service rate decisions with forward-looking customers depend on the customer intensity, potential market size and customers’ reservation utility distribution. The results suggest that customers’ heterogeneity in terms of their reservation utilities affects the optimal decisions, market coverage and the expected revenue. Service providers need to take customers’ heterogeneity and the forward-looking behavior into operational decision-making.

This paper extends previous studies in customer-intensive service and contribute to the service operations management area by explicitly incorporating customers’ forward-looking behavior and heterogeneity in purchase decision-making. Assuming customers are forward-looking and heterogeneous is more realistic and practical. The results highlight that knowing customers’ behavioral characteristics can better improve decision-making in service operations, which is critical for enhancing customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, thus critical to a firm’s success in the market with intensive competition.

Service robotics, a branch of robotics that entails the development of robots able to assist humans in their environment, is of growing interest in the hospitality industry. Designing effective autonomous service robots, however, requires an understanding of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), a relatively young discipline dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans. HRI has not yet received sufficient attention in hospitality robotic design, much like Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) in property management system design in the 1980s. This article proposes a set of introductory HRI guidelines with implementation standards for autonomous hospitality service robots.

A set of key user-centered HRI guidelines for hospitality service robots were extracted from 52 research articles. These are organized into service performance categories to provide more context for their application in hospitality settings.

Based on an extensive literature review, this article presents some HRI guidelines that may drive higher levels of acceptance of service robots in customer-facing situations. Deriving meaningful HRI guidelines requires an understanding of how customers evaluate service interactions with humans in hospitality settings and to what degree those will differ with service robots.

Robots are challenging assumptions on how hospitality businesses operate. They are being increasingly deployed by hotels and restaurants to boost productivity and maintain service levels. Effective HRI guidelines incorporate user requirements and expectations in the design specifications. Compilation of such information for designers of hospitality service robots will offer a clearer roadmap for them to follow.

Omnichannel sales have provided new impetus for the development of catering merchants. The authors thus focus on how catering merchants should manage capacities at the ordering, production and delivery stages to meet customers’ needs in different channels under third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery. This is of great significance for the development of the omnichannel catering industry.

This paper formulates the capacity decisions of omnichannel catering merchants under the third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery mode. The authors mainly use queuing theory to analyze the queuing behavior of online and offline customers, and the impact of waiting time on customer shopping behavior. In addition, the authors also characterize the merchant’s capacity by the rate in queuing model.

The authors find that capacities at ordering stage and food production stage are composed of base capacities and safety capacities, but the delivery capacities only have the latter. And in the self-delivery mode, merchants can develop higher safety capacities by charging delivery fees. The authors prove that regardless of the delivery mode, omnichannel sales can bring higher profits to merchants by integrating demand.

The authors focus on analyzing the capacity management of omnichannel catering merchants at the ordering, production and delivery stages. And the authors also add the delivery process into the omnichannel for analysis, so as to solve the problem of capacity decision-making under different delivery modes. The management of delivery capacity and its impact on other stages’ capacities are not covered in other literature studies, which is one of the main innovations of this paper.

In research on new service development (NSD), the interest has mainly been on structural aspects of the service offering. Not much attention has been paid to work environment conditions forming the basis for service oriented and effective employees. Addresses this issue by focusing on work environment requirements in NSD. Regards employee work environment requirements as a key factor for success when designing and implementing new services. After studying work environment requirements in the working life science literature indentifies five general requirements. These have been used when analyzing data from an empirical study on work environment conditions and requirements in service organizations. The analysis and interpretation shows that many requirements are the same in service organizations as in manufacturing companies but also that there are distinct differences. Based on the analysis presents a sixth requirement. Examples of requirements are: the ability to control the work situation and to be involved in the decision‐making processes, a safe physical work environment and the ability to develop social relationships through the work.

In the face of growing demand for care and tightening resource constraints, hospitals need to ensure access to care that is affordable and effective. Yet, the multiplicity of objectives is a key challenge in this industry. An understanding of the interrelationships (tradeoffs) between the multiple outcome objectives of care (throughput, experiential and financial performance) and returns to operational inputs (diversification of care) is fundamental to improving access to care that is effective and affordable. This study serves to address this need.

The empirical analysis in the study builds on an output-oriented distance function model and uses a longitudinal panel dataset from 153 hospitals in California.

This study results point to key insights related to output–output tradeoffs along the production frontier. Specifically, the authors find that higher throughput rates may lead to significantly lower levels of experiential quality, and net revenue from operations, accounting for the clinical quality of care. Similarly, the authors’ findings highlight the resource intensity and operational challenges of improving experiential quality of care. In regards to input–output relationships, this study finds diversification of care is associated with increased throughput, improvements in service satisfaction and a corresponding increase in the net revenue from operations.

Highlighting the tradeoffs along the production frontier among the various outcomes of interest (throughput, experiential quality and net revenue from operations), and highlighting the link between diversification of care and care delivery outcomes at the hospital level are key contributions of this study. An understanding of the tradeoffs and returns in healthcare delivery serves to inform policy-making with key managerial implications in the delivery of care.

Pricing is widely acknowledged as a market entry challenge for servitising companies. The purpose of this research is to ascertain the attributes that contribute to willingness to pay (WTP) for industrial services and suggest incorporating those attributes to a pricing model.

Three attributes (Quality of Service, Nearness of Service Provider and Brand Equity of Service Provider) were analyzed at three respective levels to ascertain their importance on WTP. Conventional conjoint analysis (CCA), using an orthogonal design, was the method used. The 346 respondents were decision-makers and top management professionals from various industries.

Brand Equity emerged as the most significant attribute contributing to WTP, having more than 45% importance – followed by the Quality and Nearness.

The scope of the study is limited to the industries and its Allies. However, the relative importance of the attributes may vary depending on the type of service.

The importance of attributes and their WTP preference helps future researchers create a pricing model involving these attributes. This helps service providers price their services rationally, thus succeeding in servitization.

Product life is extended because the manufacturers themselves are servicing it and also help recycle the product with their expertise. Servitization is also helpful for the Indian economy, as it is turning into a manufacturing economy.

This research investigates three attributes that contribute to WTP, in accordance with their level of contribution. It also provides a direction to establish an adequate pricing model for industrial services.

Motivated by consumers' concerns about water resources, this paper studies the interactive impact of advertising efforts and water-saving on corporate profits in apparel supply chains. Moreover, this study attempts to find an effective way to improve the profit of supply chain members under different game scenarios. Therefore, this study explores the game scenarios with considering the cost-sharing contract.

This paper constructs two basic game models considering different market power in the apparel supply chains, and explores the Pareto improvement combined with cost-sharing contracts based on the basic models. Furthermore, this study extends the models by considering cost-saving and non-linear demand.

In this paper, it can be found that advertising efforts and water-saving have complex interactive relationships. Counter-intuitively, the increase in advertising efforts may increase water savings. Furthermore, it presents a Pareto improvement when considering cost-sharing contracts, and both the manufacturer and the retailer's profits may improve simultaneously. Moreover, it does not affect the main conclusions when consider the effects of cost-saving and non-linear demand.

Although some important findings have been reached, this paper can be extended in many ways in the future. For example, the coordination mechanism among supply chain members can be considered and the fair distribution of profits can be studied. Moreover, the influence of the government policies on the optimal strategy, as well as changes in social welfare can be considered.

This study offers supply chain members the guidelines on coordinating water-saving investment and advertising efforts which provided new insight into the interaction of these two factors in the apparel supply chains. Moreover, it can provide a coordination mechanism for the supply chain members to improve their profits.

This paper explores the interactive relationship between water-saving and advertising efforts. It can not only save more water resources but also enable consumers to enjoy more environmentally friendly apparel products.

The current literature mainly focuses on the impact of advertising efforts on firm profit. However, this paper studies the interaction between advertising efforts and water-saving in apparel supply chains. Furthermore, this study explores the optimal pricing strategies and Pareto improvement by considering cost-sharing contracts. It can provide theoretical and practical guidance for the decision-maker in deciding on advertising and water-saving investment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between technical and social systems within an organization that potentially affect the service experience, as perceived by end customers.

The paper explores the potential impact of an integrated service quality system on the service experience. A conceptual model is presented, accompanied by a detailed development of the hypotheses. Two samples (Study 1: n=474, Study 2: n=225) of consumers are used to empirically test the proposed model.

The analysis reveals the impact a technical system has on employees’ inherent abilities (i.e. the social system), which, in turn, affect the overall assessment by customers. Additionally, the situation in which an employee works (i.e. operating environmental conditions) results in differences in the model.

This paper’s main implication is this paper employs established theory to develop a model that is empirically tested to show that implementing and maintaining a quality-oriented service system can positively influence the overall customer experience. The limitations are based primarily on the methodology in which individual employees assessed all aspects of both the social and technical systems.

Managers should be diligent in their design and implementation of the quality components as these affect the work setting in which employees operate.

Prior research has neither explored an integrated service quality system’s impact on the service experience nor employed an established theoretical framework. This work accomplishes both with the results providing contributions to both theory and practice.