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Access to services for consumers with disabilities (CwD) has gained increased attention from researchers and service providers in recent years. Consequently, ensuring that services are designed and maintained in a manner that is more inclusive and accessible to CwD has become imperative. However, academic literature is fragmented and thus, this study aims to provide a state-of-the-art synthesis for further theoretical development.

This study reviews 77 relevant articles in the domain using a multidisciplinary review following the PRISMA protocol, and a thematic analysis was conducted.

The study thoroughly synthesizes the theories, contexts and methods used in the extant literature. Next, the study presents a new theoretical framework with four broader dimensions: beyond regulations, towards accessibility, value co-creation, inclusion of CwD and role of stakeholders. Furthermore, it highlights the related sub-dimensions attributed to the service design stages (planning, usage and post-usage). Based on this, the study offers critical avenues for future research using the Double Diamond framework.

The study contributes significantly to service design literature for CwD and transformative service research by developing a new consolidated theoretical framework. The findings should direct service providers towards better service designs in related fields. Socially, the study has implications for promoting accessibility and inclusion for CwD, while providing them the freedom of choice.

With the growing importance of services in the overall economy, it is surprising that the notion of service firms investing in systematic and dedicated innovation activities has taken so long to materialize. This is now set to change as service firms undertake the kind of research, design and development disciplines which for more than a century have been mainstays of modern manufacturing.

S&L interviews the well-known former editor of Harvard Business Review Thomas A. Stewart and his co-author, former BloombergBusinessweek.com editor Patricia O’Connell, in their latest book, Woo, Wow and Win: Service Design, Strategy and the Art of Customer Delight (Harper Business, 2016). They believe we are on the cusp of a “design revolution” in services.

The central thesis of their book is that services “should be designed with as much care as products are” and they include service “delivery” in that premise.

Service design principles offer powerful new ways to address the three basic strategy questions: What do we sell? To whom? And how do we win?

Service design helps you understand how to configure a set of activities, behaviors and touchpoints–a journey–that allows you to serve that customer well.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge service researchers to design for service inclusion, with an overall goal of achieving inclusion by 2050. The authors present service inclusion as an egalitarian system that provides customers with fair access to a service, fair treatment during a service and fair opportunity to exit a service.

Building on transformative service research, a transformative, human-centered approach to service design is proposed to foster service inclusion and to provide a platform for managerial action. This conceptual study explores the history of service exclusion and examines contemporary demographic trends that suggest the possibility of worsening service exclusion for consumers worldwide.

Service inclusion represents a paradigm shift to higher levels of understanding of service systems and their fundamental role in human well-being. The authors argue that focused design for service inclusion is necessary to make service systems more egalitarian.

The authors propose four pillars of service inclusion: enabling opportunity, offering choice, relieving suffering and fostering happiness.

Service organizations are encouraged to design their offerings in a manner that promotes inclusion and permits customers to realize value.

This comprehensive research agenda challenges service scholars to use design to create inclusive service systems worldwide by the year 2050. The authors establish the moral imperative of design for service inclusion.

The proliferation of (big) data provides numerous opportunities for service advances in practice, yet research on using data to advance service is at a nascent stage in the literature. Many studies have discussed phenomenological benefits of data to service. However, limited research describes managerial issues behind such benefits, although a holistic understanding of the issues is essential in using data to advance service in practice and provides a basis for future research. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap.

“Using data to advance service” is about change in organizations. Thus, this study uses action research methods of creating real change in organizations together with practitioners, thereby adding to scientific knowledge about practice. The authors participated in five service design projects with industry and government that used different data sets to design new services.

Drawing on lessons learned from the five projects, this study empirically identifies 11 managerial issues that should be considered in data-use for advancing service. In addition, by integrating the issues and relevant literature, this study offers theoretical implications for future research.

“Using data to advance service” is a research topic that emerged originally from practice. Action research or case studies on this topic are valuable in understanding practice and in identifying research priorities by discovering the gap between theory and practice. This study used action research over many years to observe real-world challenges and to make academic research relevant to the challenges. The authors believe that the empirical findings will help improve service practices of data-use and stimulate future research.

While service scholars see modularisation as balancing the efficiency of standardisation with the value added through customisation the relationships between these concepts are under-theorised. In addition, although information and communication technologies can facilitate all three service strategies, the degree to which they codify service knowledge is not explicitly considered in the extant literature. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model that examines service strategy trajectories by specifically considering the ICTs used and the degree of knowledge codification employed.

This study draws on three qualitative case studies of service departments of firms involved in cardiovascular applications, orthopaedic, spinal and neuroscience product development and information technology support. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews, document analysis and non-participant observation.

Findings show that ICTs were increasingly used to codify both standardised and customised services, though in different ways. For standardised services ICTs codified the service process, making them even more rigid. Due to the dynamic nature of customised services, drawing on experts' tacit knowledge, ICTs codified the possessors of knowledge rather than the service process they undertook. This study also identified a duality between the tacit development of customised services and modular service codification.

The model is validated using case studies from three companies in the medical and information technology sectors limiting its generalisability.

The importance of considering the degree of tacitness or explicitness of service knowledge is important for service codification. The paper provides managers with empirical examples of how ICTs are used to support all three strategies, allows them to identify their current position and indicates possible future trajectories.

The papers main contribution is the development of a model that integrates the literature on service strategies with knowledge management strategies to classify service standardisation, customisation and modularisation in terms of both service orientation and degree of ICT codification.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the patterns of service strategy changes in manufacturing firms and indicates how each pattern is interrelated with modifications in organizational design elements.

The paper draws on a longitudinal study using a survey of 97 manufacturers of capital goods. In addition, 15 case studies have been conducted. Survey and qualitative data are obtained in 1997, 2001, and 2004.

The findings highlight four patterns of service strategy changes: from customer service strategy to after‐sales service provider, from after‐sales service provider to customer‐support service provider, from customer‐support service provider to development partner, and from customer‐support service provider to the outsourcing partner. Evidence of specific alignment between service strategy and organizational design elements is provided.

The main limitation of this paper is the purposive sample.

Managers should follow the patterns of service strategy changes by extending the service offerings and modifying the organizational design elements.

Previous studies investigate service strategies and organizational design elements only at a specific time, which leads to a static perspective. This paper offers insights into interrelations among service strategy changes and organizational design elements.

This paper aim to propose a model of analysis that justifies gamification as an adequate tool to improve the design of services through the human centered design (HCD) methodology.

The present study is a conceptual contribution. Based on the information provided by the academic literature on the design of services, HCD and gamification, the suitability of the proposed model is justified to help the servitized companies to improve the design of their services.

There is a gap in the academic literature about how a servitized company develops its service design process; consumers demand experiences through services; involving consumers in the co-creation of value and co-design of services can guide servitized companies to achieve success with servitization; gamification is an effective tool as a relational marketing strategy.

The review of the literature carried out in this paper provides a solid theoretical basis for future researchers in the area of servitization, service design and relational marketing. However, given the conceptual nature of the research, it is necessary to validate empirically the proposed model.

The proposed model can be useful as a reference for manufacturing companies to guide their servitization process. The study extends the debate on how to integrate the design of services by presenting a model of development based on gamification.

Having knowledge of the end-user is essential throughout the service design process and gamification can be achieved as a HCD technique.

To deliver superior customer experiences, retailers are increasingly turning to augmented reality (AR) technologies for new digital services that can enhance their customer interactions. The potential of AR has been validated in lab experiments, but when implemented in real-world contexts, its commercial impact has been limited. Therefore, this paper investigates how to design AR-based services (AR services) that enhance customer experiences in retail.

The paper uses a conceptual research approach to integrate research on AR in the context of retail, combining customer, retailer, and technical perspectives with the design thinking method to demonstrate how the challenge of AR service design can be addressed through design thinking.

The paper develops propositions that explain how a design thinking method is useful in the design of effective AR services. The paper also articulates principles for how to implement the design thinking method in the specific context of AR for enhanced customer experiences.

The study documents critical practices for retailers seeking to be competitive with superior customer experiences under the increasing digitalization of retailer-customer interactions.

The study contributes to the service design literature by answering the call to develop moderately abstracted explanations of how different digital technologies can be used to provision new services in different application domains, with the focus here being the design of AR services in the context of retail.

Circumstances such as pandemics can cause individuals to fall into a state of need, so they turn to donation services for assistance. However, donation services can be designed based on supply-side considerations, e.g. efficiency or inventory control, which restrict consumer choice without necessarily considering how consumer vulnerabilities like low financial or interpersonal power might cause them to react to such restrictions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine service designs that limit the choices consumers are given in terms of either the allowable quantity or assortment variety and examine effects on consumer perceptions of justice and satisfaction.

Three experiments are reported, including one manipulating the service design of an actual food pantry.

When consumers have low financial or interpersonal power, meaning their initial state of control is low, and they encounter a donation service that provides limited (vs. expanded) choice that drops control even lower, they perceive the situation as unjust and report lower satisfaction.

Donation service providers should strive to design services that allow for expanded consumer choice and use interpersonal processes that empower beneficiaries so they perceive the service experience as just and satisfying. Collecting feedback from beneficiaries is also recommended.

While researchers have started to look at the service experiences of vulnerable populations, they have focused primarily on financial service designs. The authors look at donation service designs and identify problems with supply-side limits to choice quantity and assortment.

The purpose of this paper is to give a structured literature review, design concepts, and research propositions related to a product‐oriented design theory for information services. Information services facilitate the exchange of information goods with or without transforming these goods. Exemplar information services are e‐publishing, electronic communities‐of‐practice, and management reporting. The importance of information services in the current economy merits the development of an explicit product‐ and process‐oriented design theory.

This article focuses on the product‐oriented design theory by applying Walls et al.'s framework. A product‐oriented design theory of information services identifies relevant descriptive and explanatory insights (i.e. content, use, value, and revenue), meta‐requirements, and meta‐designs. The paper describes design problems for information services, and gives key requirements for information services. Next, it describes the information, organizational and information technological components of an information service, and identifies at least four information service architectures. Finally, it gives research hypotheses, research ideas, and discusses practical implications.

The results form a product‐oriented design theory for information services. The paper gives a structured way for practitioners to analyze information service design challenges, and suggestions are given for requirements and design decisions on three aspects (content, use feature, and revenue).

Given the previously fragmented nature of the literature, this paper gives new opportunities for research and practice.