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This article proposes a new theoretical background against which to measure customer experience for omnichannel service deliveries and communications based on the concept of proximity. This represents a first step in developing a new measurement approach for omnichannel customer experience.

The methodological approach is based on literature review and theory development. Various streams of literature are integrated on the basis of their interactionist nature (service logic, psychological distance theory, and omnichannel customer experience literature), and theory is developed based thereon.

Successful omnichannel service deliveries and communications should build proximity with the customer during interactions at the different touchpoints. Proximity represents the value-in-use for the customer, who is coproducer of value at each interaction. Proximity can be applied to all touchpoints, thus strengthening seamlessness for omnichannel service deliveries and communications.

This research advances knowledge by integrating the concepts of omnichannel and proximity under the lenses of service logic. The author proposes a new theoretical background for the measurement of omnichannel customer experience that contributes to the literature. In modern omnichannel service deliveries and communications, a measurement approach based on proximity fulfills the need to reconcile customer experiences at both remote and physical touchpoints for a holistic and coherent customer experience. Use of the four proximity dimensions (social, temporal, spatial, and hypothetical) gives flexibility to managers to build proximity across remote and physical touchpoints in different industries.

The authors seek to propose the notion of ubiquitous proximity e‐service for exploring collective wisdom in the ubiquitous environment. Ubiquitous proximity e‐service highlights the collective effort focused on collecting the user group's power as the reference for ubiquitous trust decisions.

This paper provides some theoretical utility support for ubiquitous proximity e‐service. The “homophily” describes the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. By highlighting the “homophily” of e‐service participants, these isolated individuals can be treated as a group with proximity. The main value of ubiquitous proximity e‐service utilizes the network effect from the collective effort of interpersonal social network.

In order to leap the trust barrier for users to embrace these ubiquitous e‐services, ubiquitous proximity e‐service makes it possible for users to collaborate with their nearby user groups to establish a reliable and trustworthy interaction environment. The simulation outcomes for trust decision quality enhancement show a significant improvement in a variety of environment settings.

A significant value of ubiquitous proximity e‐service lies in the increased possibility of establishing innovative social network relationships. From the interpersonal perspective, unfamiliar strangers can make connections with individuals who are proximal and homoplastic to them. The strength of proximity gives people better chances to make interpersonal connections, including both weak ties and strong ties. By combining those interpersonal tie relationships, ubiquitous proximity e‐service can easily cause information diffusion and effectively encourage collective wisdom.

The paper advocates the utility of ubiquitous proximity e‐service that can be realized in the e‐commerce environment and which enables information diffusion effectively.

Internet of Things’ (IoT’s) first wave started with tracking services for better inventory management mainly using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Later on, monitoring services became one of the major interests, including sensing technologies, and then more actuation for remote control-type of IoT applications such as smart homes, smart cities and Industry 4.0. In this paper, the authors focus on the RFID technology impairment. They propose to take advantage of the mature IoT technologies that offer native service discovery such as blutooth or LTE D2D ProSe or Wifi Direct. Using the automatic service discovery in the new framework will make heterogeneous readers aware of the presence of other readers and this will be used by the proposed distributed algorithm to better control the multiple RFID reader interference problem. The author clearly considers emerging Industry 4.0 use case, where RFID technology is of major interest for both identification and tracking. To enhance the RFID tag reading performance, collisions in the RFID frequency should be minimized with reader-to-reader coordination protocols. In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation.

In this paper, the author proposes a simple distributed reader anti-collision protocol named DiSim that makes use of proximity services of IoT network and is compliant with the current RFID standards. The author evaluates the efficiency of the proposal via simulation to study its behavior in very dense and heterogeneous RFID environments. Specifically, the author explores the coexistence of powerful static readers and small mobile readers, comparing the proposal with a standard ETSI CSMA method. The proposal reduces significantly the number of access attempts, which are resource-expensive for the readers. The results show that the objectives of DiSim are met, producing low reader collision probability and, however, having lower average readings per reader per time.

DiSim is evaluated with the ETSI standard LBT protocol for multi-reader environments in several environments with varied levels of reader and tag densities, having both static powerful RFID readers and heterogeneous randomly moving mobile RFID readers. It effectively reduces the number of backoffs or contentions for the RFID channel. This has high reading success rate due to the avoided collisions; however, the readers are put to wait, and DiSim has less average readings per reader per time. As an additional side evaluation, the ETSI standard LBT mechanism was found to present a good performance for low-density mid-coverage scenarios, however, with high variability on the evaluation results.

To show more results, the author needs to do real experimentation in a warehouse, such as Amazon warehouse, where he expects to have more and more robots, start shelves, automatic item finding on the shelve, etc.

Future work considers experimentation in a real warehouse equipped with heterogeneous RFID readers and real-time analysis of RFID reading efficiency also combined with indoor localization and navigation for warehouse mobile robots.

More automatization is expected in the future; this work makes the use of RFID technology more efficient and opens more possibilities for services deployment in different domains such as the industry which was considered not only in this paper but also in smart cites and smart homes.

Compared to the literature, the proposal offers the advantage to not be dependent on a centralized server controlling the RFID readers. It also offers the possibility for an existing RFID architecture to add new readers from a different manufacturer, as the readers using the approach will have the possibility to discover the capabilities of the new interaction other RFID readers. This solution takes advantage of the available proximity service that will be more and more offered by the IoT technologies.

The purpose of this study is to find out the factors that influence dental travelers’ revisit intention (RI) to Tijuana, Mexico.

Based on the push and pull model, five constructs were included: quality service, price, supporting services, cultural proximity and quality information. The information was obtained by applying an online survey to a sample of 384 dental tourists in Tijuana, Mexico, who were repeat patients of a dental clinic in Tijuana after the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploratory factor analysis, average variance explained and composite reliability were conducted to ensure the validity of each construct. Multiple regression analysis was done to identify predictors of travelers’ RI.

The results obtained show that cultural proximity, quality service, price and supporting services influenced the travelers’ revisit behavior after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge on travel behavior in dental tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which has been scarcely studied. Also, RI was analyzed, focusing on repeated travelers to propose a model mainly for borders or frontiers where developed and developing countries co-exist and interact.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between the determinants of relationship marketing and the behavioural component of these determinants within a non-Western retail stores setting.

A quantitative approach was employed, using 19-item, seven-point Likert scaled questionnaire administered to 350 participants with 67 per cent usable response rate. Data was analysed using exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s α internal consistency; correlation analysis and One-Way Analysis of Variance test.

Trust-Quality services emerged as the most outstanding determinant of relationship marketing within the retail stores context followed by relational orientation, commitment and proximity. Quality services were found to have the most significant positive impact on trust whereas trust was found to have a strong positive impact on commitment. Relational orientation was found to have a strong positive impact on trust, commitment and quality services but proximity was found to be a docile factor determining commitment and relational orientation. Finally, consumers were identified as being more relationally oriented than retailers and all categories of consumers can be served with same blend of relationship marketing strategies.

Since findings could not be generalized across other sectors and regions, guides for testing the proposed research model are put forward.

Relationship marketing implementation within the context of retail stores will be more successful if based on delivery of quality services. Consumers are also more likely to patronize closer than distant retail stores. As such, even if retail firms build strong trust, commitment and relational orientation with customers through quality services, consumers will still patronize stores that are closer to them more than stores in distant locations. Siting retail stores in locations with the largest pool of customers’ is therefore central to enhancing retail stores performance. All categories of customers could be served with same stream of relationship marketing strategies because designing different schemes of relationship marketing programmes for different customer categories were found to be counter-productive.

This paper identified 16 attributes that are important to consumers under four dimensions: Trust-Quality services, relational orientation, commitment and proximity within the retail stores context. The findings are acknowledged to be unique because they emerged from a largely under-researched collectivistic emerging market where relationship marketing formation is key.

In an increasingly budget-constrained environment, the Department of Defense (DoD) must maximize the value of fiscal resources obligated on service contracts. Over half of DoD procurement spending between 2008 and 2012 was obligated on service contracts (GAO, 2013). Many services are common across the enterprise and recurring in nature; however, they are treated as unique and procured individually at the base level, year after year, rather than collectively in accordance with a larger, enterprise-wide category management strategy. The purpose of this paper is to focus on creating a methodology that treats common, recurring service requirements in a more strategic manner.

The authors develop a standardized, repeatable methodology that uses relevant cost drivers to analyze service requirements to identify more efficient procurement strategies. Furthermore, they create a clustering continuum to organize services based on proximity between the customer-supplier bases. This paper uses a commercial business mapping software to analyze cost driver data, produce visualizations and illustrate strategic opportunities for category management initiatives. DoD requirements for Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) within the Los Angeles area are evaluated using the software and methodology to demonstrate a model for practical application.

The authors find that commercial software can be used to cluster requiring activities needing common, recurring services. This standardized, repeatable method can be applied to any category of services with any number of cost drivers. By identifying optimal requiring activity clusters, procurement agencies can more effectively implement category management strategies for service requirements.

The initial approach of this paper was to develop a macro-level, one-size-fits-all model to centralize procurement. The authors found this approach inadequate as they tried to group service requirements of wildly differing characteristics. They experienced other significant limiting factors related to data availability and data collection.

Clustering common and recurring DoD service requirements would result in standardized levels of service at all installations. The demand savings from clustering would promote the implementation of best practices for that service requirement across the DoD, which would eliminate non-value-added activities currently performed at some installations, or gold-plating of requirements, which is also likely occurring.

This paper is the first to use an analytics-based methodology to cluster common, recurring public services. It is the first method that offers a standardized, repeatable approach to implementing category management of service requirements to achieve cost savings.

The purpose of this paper is to measure, characterize and correlate relationships between spaces within an academic library and the amount of use they receive from patrons.

Login data gathered from computers were analyzed spatially using AutoCAD and ArcGIS to characterize the relative popularity of each computer. The login data were correlated to each computer's proximity to the entrance, a picture window, its printer, quantity of neighboring computers, and service points.

Descriptive statistics reveal high usage of computers close to the entrance and close to service points. The strongest relationship of all was with a combination of attractors rather than any one attractor. Other measures were less closely correlated with usage, with proximity to window having little to no correlation. These hypotheses merit further study.

Understanding the use of technology in library spaces is important to inform future facility planning to meet patron needs.

The distant data centre-centric Internet of Things (IoT) systems face the latency issue especially in the real-time-based applications, such as augmented reality, traffic analytics and ambient assisted living. Recently, Fog computing models have been introduced to overcome the latency issue by using the proximity-based computational resources, such as the computers co-located with the cellular base station, grid router devices or computers in local business. However, the increasing users of Fog computing servers cause bottleneck issues and consequently the latency issue arises again. This paper aims to introduce the utilisation of Mist computing (Mist) model, which exploits the computational and networking resources from the devices at the very edge of the IoT networks.

This paper proposes a service-oriented mobile-embedded Platform as a Service (mePaaS) framework that allows the mobile device to provide a flexible platform for proximal users to offload their computational or networking program to mePaaS-based Mist computing node.

The prototype has been tested and performance has been evaluated on the real-world devices. The evaluation results have shown the promising nature of mePaaS.

The proposed framework supports resource-aware autonomous service configuration that can manage the availability of the functions provided by the Mist node based on the dynamically changing hardware resource availability. In addition, the framework also supports task distribution among a group of Mist nodes.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap in knowledge of Jamaican householders’ housing choices and to provide empirical research that will support the inclusion of the householders’ perspectives in developing housing policies and programmes in Jamaica.

A questionnaire survey of 430 householders drawn from public housing developments in 6 of 14 parishes in Jamaica was conducted. A pragmatic approach was taken in this study. As such, both qualitative and quantitative data were used to investigate the factors influencing householders’ housing choices. The data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis to extract the main factors influencing the householders’ housing choices.

The research revealed that the dwelling features and its environment, accessibility and neighbourhood attributes are three factors influencing householders’ housing choice. Notably, the dwelling and its immediate environment explained the majority of the variance in housing choice. This suggests that if householders are given a choice between a larger more desirable dwelling in a clean, safe and well-maintained community and housing with proximity to work, job opportunities, urban services and other proximity variables, they are less likely to choose the latter.

The factors obtained from this study provide some insights into the scale of preference of the household heads and desired attributes of affordable housing solutions. They also shed some light on what might have caused some past affordable housing solutions to be undesirable. In addition to this, there is some intuition that there may be efficacy in adopting a community development approach to housing. These results have strong implications for housing planning. However, given the island’s challenge with the proliferation of squatter settlements, it is recommended that further research, which includes these householders’ be carried out.

This research is the first to examine the views of Jamaican householders’ with the purpose of understanding what influences their choice of housing. The findings provide new insights into the trade-off that householders may be willing to make in choosing their housing. The results provide a source of reference in reviewing the performance of past policies and programmes.

This paper presents research results and implications in the literature for the last 15 years, and suggests guidelines on how to make the best use of the information to develop strategies that “fit” a service operation. There are considerable benefits of customer satisfaction, loyalty and increased profits from developing strategies to prevent service failures and strategies to successfully implement service recovery.