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This study aims to develop an empathetic and user-centric customer support service design model. Though service design has been a critical research focus for several decades, few studies focus on customer support services. As customer support gains importance as a source of competitive advantage in the present era, this paper aims to contribute to industry and academia by exploring the service design model.

The study adopted a theories-in-use approach to elucidate mental models based on the industry’s best practices. In-depth interviews with 62 professionals led to critical insights into customer service design development, supported by service-dominant logic and theory of mind principles.

The ensuing insights led to a model that connects the antecedents and outcomes of empathetic and user-centric customer service design. The precursors include people, processes and technology, while the results are user experience, service trust and service advocacy. The model also emphasises the significance of the user’s journey and the user service review in the overall service design.

The model developed through this study addresses the critical gap concerning the lack of service design research in customer support services. The key insights from this study contribute to the ongoing research endeavours towards transitioning customer support services from an operational unit to a strategic value-creating function. Future scholars may investigate the applicability of the empathetic user service design across cultures and industries. The new model must be customised using real-time data and analytics across user journey stages.

The empathetic and user-centric design can elevate the customer service function as a significant contributor to the overall customer experience, loyalty and positive word of mouth. Practitioners can adopt the new model to provide superior customer service experiences. This original research was developed through crucial insights from interviews with senior industry professionals.

This research is the original work developed through the key insights from the interview with senior industry professionals.

Cancer has become a priority among today’s health problems. Therefore, providing facilities that ensure high-quality cancer treatment has become an essential design problem. Additionally, a considerable number of studies have introduced the ‘healing environment concept’ as a substantial input for healthcare buildings. The purpose of this paper is to present a design guide for cancer treatment services that is compatible with the healing environment concept.

In this context, studies on the healing environment have been analyzed, and the legislation of some selected countries has been assessed. Then, all the filtered data are used to form the design guideline for chemotherapy department, radiation oncology department and inpatient care services under a new series of analysis criteria.

The resulting principles are revealed according to the criteria of general settlement principles, internal function relations, medical necessities, user experience, interior design, social interaction/privacy, safety, landscape design and outdoor relations by the help of proposed plans, diagrams and schematic drawings.

This research constitutes the first and yet only study in its field that aims to increase efficiency and user satisfaction and provide better patient-centered care while providing a design guide on health-care architecture.

In times of strong global competition and worldwide economic downturn, there is an imperative need for public services organizations to reform and improve their quality. These organizations can base their improvement efforts on Lean philosophy. The purpose of this study is to assess the employees’ perceived degree of adoption of Lean principles by public services organizations in Greece. Determining the differences in the perceptions of groups of employees with regard to the adoption of Lean principles by public organizations is also an aim of the study.

A questionnaire survey was published online, inviting employees of Greek public services organizations to assess the degree of Lean adoption by their organizations, specified on the basis of general principles. A total of 1,022 employees completed the structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were applied to assess the degree of adoption of Lean principles by public organizations. The nonparametric Mann–Whitney U Test and Kruskal–Wallis Test were also applied to determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the perceptions of groups of employees with regard to the adoption of Lean principles by public organizations.

According to the perceptions of employees, Greek public organizations adopt Lean principles to a high extent. However, there is room for further improvement in the degree to which Lean is adopted. Statistically significant differences are observed in the perceptions of groups of employees from different sized organizations, hierarchical levels, skill sets and service subsectors, with regard to the degree of adoption of Lean principles by their organizations.

The employees of the public sector who were invited to respond to the survey through social media, the subjective nature of the data collected and the fact that this is a country-specific study constitute the main limitations of the present study, based on which future studies can be designed.

By determining the strong and weak points of the adoption of Lean principles by Greek public services organizations, suitable managerial initiatives can be undertaken by these organizations to fully adopt Lean, eliminate waste and enhance quality management.

Understanding and improving the current status of the adoption of Lean principles by Greek public organizations will influence the services provided to the citizens in terms of time, quality and delivery.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which provides insights, based on employees’ perceptions, into the adoption of Lean by the public services sector.

The lack of conceptual approaches for organizing and expressing capabilities, usage and impact of intelligent machines (IMs) in work settings is an obstacle to moving beyond isolated case examples, domain-specific studies, 2 × 2 frameworks and expert opinion in discussions of IMs and work. This paper's purpose is to illuminate many issues that often are not addressed directly in research, practice or punditry related to IMs. It pursues that purpose by presenting an integrated approach for identifying and organizing important aspects of analysis and evaluation related to IMs in work settings. 

This paper integrates previously published ideas related to work systems (WSs), smart devices and systems, facets of work, roles and responsibilities of information systems, interactions between people and machines and a range of criteria for evaluating system performance.

Eight principles outline a straightforward and flexible approach for analyzing and evaluating IMs and the WSs that use them. Those principles are based on the above ideas.

This paper provides a novel approach for identifying design choices for situated use of IMs. The breadth, depth and integration of this approach address a gap in existing literature, which rarely aspires to this paper’s thoroughness in combining ideas that support the description, analysis, design and evaluation of situated uses of IMs.

Co-production has received increasing attention from managers and researchers in public services. In the health care sector, co-production has become a by-word for the meaningful engagement of patients yet there is still a lack of knowledge around what works when co-producing services. The paper sets out a set of pragmatic principles which may guide anyone embarking on co-producing health care services, and provides an illustration of a co-produced Young People’s Health Research Group in England. We conclude by outlining some learning points which are useful when establishing co-production projects.

Using a dynamic capabilities approach, the present study aims to identify and assess the effects of organizational determinants on capabilities underlying Industry 4.0 design principles, such as integration, virtualization, real-time, automation and servitization.

PLS-SEM enables a two-stage hierarchical latent variable reflective-formative model which was used for assessing the effect of organizational determinants on Industry 4.0 design principles. Five hundred six manufacturing companies constitute the effective sample, representing a population of manufacturing companies in an industrialized country.

The findings reveal that Industry 4.0 design principles extensively depend on digitalization resource availability. At the same time, companies that possess digitalization and change management capabilities tend to devote more resources to digitalization. Finally, the paper reveals that networking and partnership capability is the critical enabler for change management and digitalization capabilities.

The paper provides empirical evidence that the successful development of Industry 4.0 design principles and their underlying integration, virtualization, real-time, automation and servitization capabilities are resource dependent, requiring significant upfront investment and continuous resource allocation. Further, the study implies that companies with networking and partnership, change management and digitalization capabilities tend to allocate more resources for Industry 4.0 transformation.

Exclusively focusing on empirical research that reported applied insights into determinants of Industry 4.0 design principles, the study offers unique implications for promoting Industry 4.0 digital transformation among manufacturing companies.

Connecting autonomous drones to ground operations and services is a prerequisite for the adoption of scalable and sustainable drone services in the built environment. Despite the rapid advance in the field of autonomous drones, the development of ground infrastructure has received less attention. Contemporary airport design offers potential solutions for the infrastructure serving autonomous drone services. To that end, this paper aims to construct a framework for connecting air and ground operations for autonomous drone services. Furthermore, the paper defines the minimum facilities needed to support unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous logistics and the collection of aerial data.

The paper reviews the state-of-the-art in airport design literature as the basis for analysing the guidelines of manned aviation applicable to the development of ground infrastructure for autonomous drone services. Socio-technical system analysis was used for identifying the service needs of drones.

The key findings are functional modularity based on the principles of airport design applies to micro-airports and modular service functions can be connected efficiently with an autonomous ground handling system in a sustainable manner addressing the concerns on maintenance, reliability and lifecycle.

As the study was limited to the airport design literature findings, the evolution of solutions may provide features supporting deviating approaches. The role of autonomy and cloud-based service processes are quintessentially different from the conventional airport design and are likely to impact real-life solutions as the area of future research.

The findings of this study provided a framework for establishing the connection between the airside and the landside for the operations of autonomous aerial services. The lack of such framework and ground infrastructure has hindered the large-scale adoption and easy-to-use solutions for sustainable logistics and aerial data collection for decision-making in the built environment.

The evolution of future autonomous aerial services should be accessible to all users, “democratising” the use of drones. The data collected by drones should comply with the privacy-preserving use of the data. The proposed ground infrastructure can contribute to offloading, storing and handling aerial data to support drone services’ acceptability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper describes the first design framework for creating a design concept for a modular and autonomous micro-airport system for unmanned aviation based on the applied functions of full-size conventional airports.

This paper aims to assess the quality management (QM) principles in facilities management (FM) service delivery for office buildings. This is to create a quality culture that will enhance the performance of FM service delivery towards meeting the users' requirements and needs.

This study adopts a quantitative methodology via a questionnaire survey for the data collection. In total, 24.41% of respondents from the registered FM companies in Malaysia attended the survey. SPSS 27.0 was used to interpret the collected data, which were then reviewed through descriptive and inferential analysis.

The study signifies that customer focus, leadership, improvement, evidence-based decision-making and relationship management indicate positive connections with FM service delivery in ensuring a cost-effective working process and meeting both user requirements and legal and regulatory corporate compliance. There are 18 elements of strategic, people and structural barriers that may hinder the implementation of QM in the FM service delivery. Correspondingly, the five main key enablers suggested being teamwork and participation, leadership, continuous improvement, process management and resources and competency development-based enablers.

The study was conducted during the pandemic crisis with limited access and response from participants. However, this in-depth study was still able to synthesize the imperative QM practice in FM among FM practitioners in Malaysia.

This study provides insight into the implementation of QM principles to cultivate a quality culture that will enhance the performance and productivity in FM service delivery specifically for office buildings in Malaysia. Prior to this study, there was a lack of research pertaining to these two themes: QM and FM.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation follows a structured approach called define-measure-analyze-improve-control (DMAIC). Earlier research about its application in emergency healthcare services shows that it requires organizational transformation, which many healthcare setups find difficult. The Kotter change management model facilitates organizational transformation but has not been attempted in LSS settings till now. This study aims to integrate the LSS framework with the Kotter change management model to come up with an integrated framework that will facilitate LSS deployment in emergency health services.

Two-stage Delphi method was conducted by using a literature review. First, the success factors and barriers of LSS are investigated, especially from an emergency healthcare point of view. The features and benefits of Kotter's change management models are then reviewed. Subsequently, they are integrated to form a framework specific to LSS deployment in an emergency healthcare set-up. The elements of this framework are analyzed using expert opinion ratings. A new framework for LSS deployment in emergency healthcare has been developed, which can prevent failures due to challenges faced by organizations in overcoming resistance to changes.

The eight steps of the Kotter model such as establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating the vision, empowering others to act on the vision, planning for and creating short-term wins, consolidating improvements and producing still more change, institutionalizing new approaches are derived from the eight common errors that managers make while implementing change in the institution. The study integrated LSS principles and Kotter’s change management model to apply in emergency care units in order to reduce waste and raise the level of service quality provided by healthcare companies.

The present study could contribute knowledge to the literature by providing a framework to integrate lean management and Kotter's change management model for the emergency care unit of the healthcare organization. This framework guides decision-makers and organizations as proper strategies are required for applying lean management practices in any system.

The proposed framework is unique and no other study has prescribed any integrated framework for LSS implementation in emergency healthcare that overcomes resistance to change.