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There is currently much policy emphasis on both partnership working between health and social services in the UK and on the outcomes delivered by services. This article provides an account of two consecutive projects centred on these two themes. The first project, at the University of Glasgow, sought to address the lack of evidence about the outcomes delivered to service users by partnerships. Following from this project, the Joint Improvement Team of the Scottish Government commissioned the researchers to develop a toolkit to involve users and unpaid carers in performance management in community care in Scotland. The remit of this second project expanded during 2007 as it became linked with the development of the emerging National Outcomes Framework for community care in Scotland. This article outlines the outcomes‐based piloting work currently under way in Scotland.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to transformative service research by drawing on self-determination, elicitation of emotions framework and feelings-as-information theories to explore how customer participation, task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge, task complexity and service outcomes relate with each other.

A synthesis of relevant literature on customer participation and customer well-being reveals a conceptual model with 11 testable propositions.

The conceptual model shows that task-related affective well-being mediates the link between customer participation and service outcomes. Moreover, customer knowledge and task complexity moderate these links.

An empirically testable conceptual model models the roles of task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge and task complexity in the process by which customer participation influences service outcomes.

Service managers can use the model to design services based on the effects of different types of customer participation on task-related affective well-being.

This paper is one of the first to study the mediating role of task-related affective well-being in the relationship between customer participation and service outcomes. It does so by revealing the differential impact various types of participation have on service outcomes and the moderating role of customer knowledge and task complexity.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an integrated conceptual framework using construal level theory (CLT) to explain the differences in the effects of process and outcome service attributes on overall service evaluation and customer satisfaction based on consumption context (social), evaluation context (temporal) and individual characteristics (expertise).

The authors use two lab experiments (hotel and restaurant settings) and a field study of online reviews posted by actual hotel customers to test all the hypotheses.

Process (outcome) attributes have a stronger influence on service evaluations under low-level (high-level) construal. Specifically, process attributes have a stronger influence when customers are accompanied by proximal (vs distal) social group, evaluate a service under near (vs distant) temporal frame or have high (vs low) level of customer expertise.

Service managers can use the findings about the differences in the influence of social, temporal and individual variables on customer evaluations under process and outcome attributes to improve customers’ service experiences and satisfaction.

This paper extends past research on the influence of construal levels on customer decision making by exploring the differences in the effects of process vs outcome service attributes on overall service evaluation and customer satisfaction, under the influence of low (vs high) construal levels triggered by social, temporal and individual variables.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, clarify and consolidate the terminology around the co-creation of services, establish its forms and identify its outcomes, to resolve the conceptual pluralism in service co-creation literature.

A focused literature review screened the articles published in five major service research journals to determine relevant contributions on the concept of co-creation of services. Then, a thematic analysis identifies the forms, themes and outcomes of co-creating services in the set of 80 qualifying articles.

The study reduces conceptual pluralism by establishing different forms of co-creating services and developing an explicit definition of co-creation in services. The authors develop an integrative framework that recognizes involvement, engagement and participation as prerequisites for co-creation. Relating to the different phases of the service process, the specific co-creation forms of co-ideation, co-valuation, co-design, co-testing and co-launching are classified as regenerative co-creation, while the specific co-creation forms of co-production and co-consumption are recognized as operative co-creation. Both beneficial and counterproductive outcomes of co-creation are identified and arranged into a typology.

The integrative framework illustrates that service providers and customers are involved, engaged and participate in co-creating services, which manifests in specific forms of co-creation; they attain beneficial and counterproductive outcomes (personal, social, hedonic, cognitive, economic and pragmatic); and are influenced by a contextual multi-actor network.

Co-creation in services is actionable; the typology of outcomes suggests service managers ways to motivate customers and employees to participate in co-creating services.

This paper defines and establishes the conceptual forms of co-creating services and the identified outcomes, and develops an integrative framework of co-creation in services.

This research focuses on the role of customer behavior in service outsourcing relationships that are governed by outcome-oriented contracts. The purpose of this paper is to explain how non-collaborative customer behavior impedes the effectiveness of outcome-oriented contracts to align the goals and incentives of the customer and service provider, and leads to service provider opportunism.

Nine hypotheses are developed regarding customer behavior and the reaction of the service provider to this. These are tested using structural equation modeling with data from 213 service outsourcing relationships.

Outcome-orientated contracts in service outsourcing may have unintended consequences because they create value attribution ambiguity. This ambiguity induces non-collaborative customer behavior, which, in turn, results in service provider opportunism. This reveals a paradox, where customer behavior aimed at curbing service provider opportunism instead induces such opportunism. This chain of effects can be counteracted by increased outcome attributability, which reduces the ambiguity and, thus, the motivation for non-collaborative customer behavior.

This research extends the existing literature by stressing that non-collaborative customer behavior is a key reason why outcome-oriented contracts fail in effectively governing outsourcing relationships, and that this can be counteracted by increased outcome attributability.

Recognizing Gigerenzer’s (1991) dictum that scientists’ tools are not neutral (tools-in-use influence theory formulation as well as data interpretation), this chapter reports theory and examines data in ways that transcend the dominant logics for variable-based and case-based analyses. The theory and data analysis tests key propositions in complexity theory: (1) no single antecedent condition is a sufficient or necessary indicator of a high score in an outcome condition; (2) a few of many available complex configurations of antecedent conditions are sufficient indicators of high scores in an outcome condition; (3) contrarian cases occur, that is, low scores in a single antecedent condition associates with both high and low scores for an outcome condition for different cases; (4) causal asymmetry occurs, that is, accurate causal models for high scores for an outcome condition are not the mirror opposites of causal models for low scores for the same outcome condition. The study tests and supports these propositions in the context of customer assessments (n = 436) of service facets and service-outcome evaluations for assisted temporary-transformations of self via beauty salon and spa treatments. The findings contribute to advancing a nuanced theory of how customers’ service evaluations relate to their assessments of overall service quality and intentions to use the service. The findings support the need for service managers to be vigilant in fine-tuning service facets and service enactment to achieve the objective of high customer retention.

In the United Kingdom under the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010, there was a shift of power away from local towards central government, leading to a situation in which the role of public service organisations could appear to be mainly implementing priorities set by central government and complying with national standards, enforced through the setting of targets and the use of performance management frameworks. The key performance management systems, and the standards within them, became increasingly focused on outcomes, defined as the results that services produce that have an impact on the lives of service users and citizens – the benefits of the service rather than the volume or quality of the outputs (Willis & Bovaird, 2011).

In many contemporary service organizations, service teams or service units are the main engines used to deliver key services to customers, client or patients. However, it remains unclear how teamwork mechanisms (i.e. the ways team members work together) influence customer service outcomes, and whether these relationships vary across different service contexts. To advance knowledge on the nature of teamwork in service teams and to set an agenda for further work in this area, there is a need to integrate and synthesize findings across the diverse literature on service teamwork. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

Using a meta-analytic approach, the authors analyzed a substantial pool of relevant effect sizes (a total of 372 effect sizes from 82 studies, with 14,291 service teams/units) to examine the effects of affective, behavioral, cognitive, motivational as well as perceptual teamwork mechanisms on customer service outcomes. The authors also investigated two key service context variables (service climate and service type) as boundary conditions on these effects.

The authors found that cognitive teamwork mechanisms were more strongly positively associated with customer evaluative outcomes than other mechanisms, whereas motivational and perceptual teamwork mechanisms had stronger associations with financial outcomes. Further, four of the five teamwork mechanisms demonstrated stronger correlations under a high service climate. The strength of the correlations between the teamwork mechanisms and customer service outcomes also exhibited different patterns when considered for different service types.

As with all meta-analysis, the quality of the primary studies influences the quality of the insights obtained from summarized effects. As most studies are cross-sectional design, the relationships examined in this paper cannot be interpreted causally. The authors cannot rule out the possibility of reverse causality, for example, reciprocal effects of customer service outcomes on teamwork dynamics due to the reciprocal feedback loop between customers and service providers.

The results hold important practical implications for enhancing customer evaluation and financial performance. First, the overall findings point to the need for employers to emphasize on certain types of teamwork training in order to encourage employee collaboration within service teams. For instance, service organizations could plan team building activities for service teams to promote trust, strengthen interpersonal bonds and improve problem-solving.

The results of this study provide an integration of previous research on service teamwork and fill two important gaps in the knowledge: (1) which aspect of teamwork is more important in determining customer service outcomes? And (2) does the effect of teamwork on customer service outcomes differ across different service contexts?

Although service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.

The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).

The authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

Creating superior customer satisfaction has been considered one of the keys to the firm's success and hence, the antecedents of customer satisfaction have been examined numerous times. However, the link between customer satisfaction and peer‐to‐peer quality, which is deemed a critical component of customer experience quality, has not been spotlighted despite its importance. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a theoretical model of the relationship among outcome quality, interaction quality, peer‐to‐peer quality, and customer satisfaction as well as these variables’ impacts on customer loyalty.

To test the model, the authors conducted a survey and collected self‐administered data for data analysis. The proposed relationships were then tested using structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that outcome quality, interaction quality, and peer‐to‐peer quality perceptions significantly influence customer satisfaction, which, in turn, greatly influences customer loyalty. This study shows that outcome quality, interaction quality, and peer‐to‐peer quality should be considered pivotal elements in creating customer satisfaction and that customer satisfaction should be treated as a strategic variable to enhance customer loyalty.

The present study examines the role of familiarity as a moderating variable, finding that outcome quality has a significant influence on customer satisfaction only when patients are familiar with services provided by a hospital. That is, the influence of outcome quality on customer satisfaction becomes greater as customers become more familiar with hospital services, which are characterized as credence services. The finding is noteworthy in that it expands our understanding of the relationship between outcome quality and customer satisfaction.