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The article focuses upon the concept of self‐service within the service sector. The nature and growth, as well as the present and potential use of self‐service are analysed and explored. Starting with the service industry, several common classification and evaluation schemes are reviewed. Recent contributions to the understanding of the self‐service industry are next discussed. A model of the self‐service sector is proposed which incorporates attributes drawn from three major sectors: the consumer, the organisation, and the environment. Examples and hypotheses to be explored are included.

The European Commission SELF project enabled an international team of researchers to explore the potential for self‐service systems in libraries, to examine existing systems in detail and to devise a generalised functional specification for self‐service systems. In this article, the Project Director summarises the project's findings and its recommendations.

An overview article about self‐service ought to start with a definition of the concept. Although many of us have some idea of what constitutes self‐service, it is difficult to find a good definition. None of the encyclopaedias I examined had a separate entry for self‐service. The concept appears though in articles about retailing and self‐service restaurants. In the tenth edition of the Merriam‐Webster's Collegiate Dictionary the following definition was given: “the serving of oneself (as in a restaurant or service station) with goods or services to be paid for at a cashier's desk or by means of a coin‐operated mechanism”. This definition is old‐fashioned and much too limited. It does not cover all the aspects of self‐service that have been made possible through technical development. At the end of this article I will come back to a definition more applicable to self‐service for libraries, but I would like to start with an overview of different aspects important to a self‐service library.

The growth of self-service technologies (SST) in the retail sector has led to an increased prevalence of SST failures, and spurred academic debate on customer self-recovery of the failed services. This study sets out to explore why customers prefer or decline to engage in self-recovery. A framework integrating elements from self-determination theory and theory of planned behavior is developed to explore the impact of motivational factors, attitudes and self-efficacy on self-recovery intention.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the sample consisting of 297 users of retail kiosks in convenience stores.

The results revealed that intrinsic motivation and identified regulation directly affect customers' attitude and intention to engage in self-recovery. Despite an insignificant direct relationship, external regulation impacted self-recovery intention through attitude. Further, the association between intrinsic motivation and self-recovery intention is moderated by self-efficacy.

Much of the extant SST recovery literature has focused on company-rendered service recovery, providing little guidance to firms on how to promote self-recovery among customers. The integrated motivational-cognitive theoretical base in this study allows for a more differentiated inquiry into the factors shaping self-recovery intention, resulting in a deeper understanding of this topic. The novel insights will help retailers develop effective strategies for promoting self-recovery among users of retail kiosks.

This paper aims to investigate the concept of value self-creation and provides a formal definition for this concept. The paper suggests that it sits within an overall continuum of value creation that includes value delivery and value co-creation.

A proposed model of value self-creation was developed and empirically tested in a health care self-service, bowel screening. An online, self-completion survey was administered to Australian men and women aged 50 years and above, as this represents the primary target population for bowel screening.

The results of the structural equation modelling in AMOS suggest that consumers can self-create value, leading to desired outcomes of satisfaction with the consumption experience and behavioural intentions to engage with the self-service again in the future. The findings provide empirical evidence to suggest that consumers’ behavioural contributions represent the most important consumer contributions in self-service, followed by cognitive contributions.

The study provides an empirically validated model of value self-creation in health care self-service. Much of the existing research on value co-creation has concentrated on traditional service types and is ill-placed to explain the value creation processes in self-services. This study offers originality by addressing this gap and demonstrating to service managers how they can manage consumer contributions towards a self-service and facilitate value-self creation, even though they are not present during the consumption stage of the consumption process.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the evaluation of desirability/feasibility and adoption intention for the self-service technology of “older” consumers. This study also aims to show that the evaluation of desirability/feasibility and adoption intention varies depending on the type of customer value provided by self-service technology. Moreover, the authors improve the understanding of “older” consumers by comparing the adoption behavior through three proxies that express consumer aging: chronological age, subjective age and future time perspective.

This study was performed as an experimental design by manipulating advertisement messages of self-service technology for online grocery shopping according to customer values. There are two analytic methods applied in this study. First, the current study compares the effects of chronological age, subjective age and the future time perspective on the evaluation and adoption intention of self-service technology by using structural equation modeling. Second, this study examines the moderation effect of customer values by conducting a multi-group analysis.

The results of current research indicate that the future time perspective explains participants’ evaluation and adoption intention of self-service technology compared to chronological age and subjective age. Specifically, participants who perceive their future time to be limited, rather than expansive, negatively assess the expected desirability and feasibility of self-service technology. In addition, the results of the moderation test show that the future time perspective affects more significantly the evaluation and adoption intention of self-service technology when the functional value is emphasized rather than emotional or social value.

The results of this study showed that the effect of future time perspective on expected desirability and feasibility was almost significant in each sub-dimension, but there were relatively few factors influencing trial intention. In this respect, it is necessary to look into the impact of the details of desirability and feasibility along with other variables known to influence the adoption of self-service technology related to aging. It would be meaningful to find and operationalize items that are valid for older consumers, rather than the desirability and feasibility elements typically applied to self-service technology.

This study contributes to the extension of the socioemotional selectivity theory that has been suggested to interpret older consumers’ behaviors. This research applies the concept of future time perspective to the assessment of desirability and feasibility and adoption intention. At the same time, for the marketing managers, the comparison between proxies that represent aging proposes the ways to attract “older” consumers with appropriate emphasis on customer values.

Library management is struggling to improve productivity without reducing the quality of service to its users. With downsizing continuing to be a trend, the implementation of self‐checkout circulation systems may be an important technological investment for libraries to consider. In most large academic institutions, such circulation functions as checking out and renewing library materials have traditionally been performed by staff members. The climate may, however, be right to rethink the mode of service delivery systems and shift from providing full‐service to self‐service models, whereby the patron takes responsibility for checking out his or her own library materials.

Companies in diverse branches offer a variety of service alternatives that typically differ in terms of the degree to which customers are actively involved in service delivery processes. The purpose of this paper is to explore potential differences in consumers’ reactions to service failures across services provided by a service employee (i.e. full-services) and services that require customers’ active involvement (i.e. self-services).

Two 2 (full-service vs self-service) × 2 (no service failure vs service failure) scenario-based experiments in technological and non-technological contexts (i.e. ticket purchase and furniture assembly) were conducted.

Study results reveal that although service failures have a similar negative impact on satisfaction across both full-services and self-services, in the self-service context, the negative effect on the willingness to use the same service delivery mode again is attenuated.

By emphasizing the role of customers’ active involvement in the service delivery process, the study extends previous knowledge regarding customer response to service failures in different service settings.

By highlighting that self-service customers’ future behavioral intentions are less severely affected by service failures, the authors present an additional feature of customer involvement in service delivery processes that goes beyond the previously recognized advantages.

Despite the abundance of research on the effects of failure attributions, previous studies have predominantly examined main effects of attributions on customer responses, such that insights into potential moderating effects of failure attributions on established relationships – as investigated in this study – are still scarce.

The application of self‐service technology in transaction‐based e‐service (e.g. online financial services) creates a challenge for firms: what combination of features should they offer to satisfy needs from different customer segments? This paper seeks to address the above question by highlighting similarities and differences of consumer preferences among self‐service, hybrid service and professional service segments for online financial services.

This study employs a web‐based discrete choice experiment, in which 1,319 consumers were offered different account alternatives, which include features for self‐service and professional assistance, price per transaction, and promotion offers.

The results demonstrate that overall, consumer preferences for features of online financial services differ across segments. Moreover, with the variation in the strength of self‐reliance, interesting trends regarding the relative importance of features are observed. With the given customer segments, this study also identifies several demographic features with significant effects on the choice of service alternatives through a multinomial logistic model.

The authors believe that these results have both managerial and research implications for design and operations strategy formulation for online financial services.