Blended human-technology service realities in healthcare

PurposeThe healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services.FindingsThe authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities.Practical implicationsManagerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided.Originality/valueThis study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being.

Introducing a sensemaking perspective to the service experience

PurposeMost recent service experience research considers customers as sensemakers and sensemaking as a focal process in experience construction. Despite this, the sensemaking theory engendered in organization studies has not been applied in the quest for an in-depth understanding of the service experience. This study introduces a sensemaking perspective to the service experience and develops a conceptualization of how customers construct their experiences cognitively through sensemaking.Design/methodology/approachThe service experience literature is dominated by a focus on firms implementing service experiences for customers. This study, in contrast, investigates service experience and its formation from the customers' viewpoint: how service experiences are formed as a part of customers' everyday life and sensemaking processes instead of under service providers' control.FindingsService experience is characterized as a mental picture – a collage of meanings created by a customer through the sensemaking processes. A sensemaking framework that characterizes service experience formation and its four seminal dimensions, including the self-related, sociomaterial, retrospective and prospective sensemaking, is introduced.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the service literature by introducing a new theoretical lens through which the service experience concept can be investigated and reframed.

First-time versus repeat tourists: resistance to negative information

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the literature regarding negative information’s impact on consumer behavior in the context of tourism services. In addition, this paper empirically examines the likely difference between first-time and repeat tourists in terms of their: resistance to negative information.Design/methodology/approach Using a sample of 539 visitors to Mount Yuelu, a popular tourist destination in China, this study explores the differences between first-time and repeat tourists regarding how destination social responsibility (DSR) and service quality (SQ) influence tourist resistance to negative information.Findings The effect of SQ on resistance to negative information is stronger for repeat tourists than for first-time tourists. In addition, the study identifies that DSR and SQ have a positive impact on tourists’ resistance to negative information. Finally, findings indicate that destination identification partially mediates the relationship between DSR, SQ and tourists’ response to negative information, respectively.Research limitations/implications The findings provide valuable theoretical and empirical insights into the driving factors that influence consumer resistance to negative information.Practical implications The paper brings together DSR, SQ and tourist-destination identification to better understand the impact that visitation frequency (first-time versus repeat tourists) has on how tourists resist negative information about a tourist destination.Social implications Negative information that is generated about a destination may cause the number of future tourism visits to decline. Findings of this paper provide insight as to the framework that can make tourists more resistant to said negative information.Originality/value This study contributes to the services marketing and tourism literature by investigating the degree to which DSR and SQ affect tourist resistance to negative information as mediated by tourist-destination identification and moderated by visiting frequency.

Personal goals in consumers' adoption of mHealth services

PurposemHealth services are effective and cost efficient, yet wide-scale adoption of these services by consumers has yet to be achieved, constraining their public health benefit. Further investigation of non-technological determinants of mHealth adoption is needed; specifically, the role of consumers' goals has received scant attention and forms the research focus.Design/methodology/approachStudy 1 comprised 20 interviews with participants who possess a health goal, with the data analysed using an abductive reasoning approach. Study 2 was a 15-min online survey (n = 653), with the data analysed using multi-group structural equation modelling.FindingsStudy 1 identified several antecedents to the desirability and feasibility of consumers' health goals, which influence their desire to use mHealth services. Study 2 shows significant differences in the determinants of mHealth service acceptance depending on whether consumers set concrete as opposed to abstract goals, but social acceptance of mHealth services of these services is important for both groups.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest emphasising the importance of health goals to achieving other consumer goals (e.g. work or travel goals), the efficacy of mHealth services relative to other service alternatives for achieving those health goals, and the social acceptance of mHealth services to increase their uptake.Originality/valueThis study is the first to use construal-level theory to improve understanding of the role of consumers' goals in the adoption of mHealth services. By identifying the antecedents to goal desirability and feasibility, it also broadens the model of goal-directed behaviour.

A smart tech lever to augment caregivers' touch and foster vulnerable patient engagement and well-being

PurposeSome population groups face precarious health, reflecting their vulnerability, in terms of lack of agency or control. Smart technologies promise to transform people's lives from the enhanced connectedness, greater computational processing and more complex decision-making they can achieve. This study aims to investigate how smart technology can mitigate vulnerability and improve well-being.Design/methodology/approachThe research group, of three scholars and three managers, pursued an action research methodology with an iterative process of planning, action and learning. The authors conducted three related action studies: (1) adopting smart technologies, (2) fostering patient engagement and (3) assessing well-being.FindingsThe adoption of sensors and wearable devices had positive impacts for both patients and caregivers. Technologies highlighted their meaning as resources to support actors' (caregivers' and vulnerable patients') activities. Smart devices as resources get integrated, stimulate change and enable new practices. For caregivers, such innovative solutions help improve their knowledge of patients and their ability to act efficiently; for vulnerable patients, they fostered engagement in daily activities to improve well-being.Originality/valueThe paper delineates an overall model (SEVP) that describes how the integration of high-tech and high touch enables patient engagement to mitigate vulnerability and improve well-being.

The synergistic effects of LMX and procedural justice climate on employee motivation and customer loyalty in a retail service context

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to test how leader–member exchange (LMX) interacts with procedural justice climate to influence three types of employee motivation (i.e. achievement striving motivation, status striving motivation and communion striving motivation). Furthermore, this study empirically examines the indirect effects of LMX on customer loyalty through employee motivation and service orientation.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a matched sample of 188 retail service employees and 376 customers from a large shopping mall in South Korea to test the empirical model. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and bootstrapping method were employed to test a series of proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe results show that LMX significantly enhances customer loyalty through two motivational dimensions and service orientation. In particular, this study shows that achievement and status striving motivation are directly related to service orientation, but communion striving motivation does not affect customer-focused service attitude. In addition, procedural justice climate serves as a critical moderator and synergistically interacts with LMX to influence achievement and status striving motivation.Research limitations/implicationsThis study offers new insight regarding how managers' roles in both individual (leader–member exchange) and organizational (procedural justice climate) level affect different forms of retail service employee motivation and service orientation, which in turn, result in customer loyalty.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that when retail service employees perceive procedural fairness at retail stores, they are more motivated to work hard to complete their assignments and achieve their sales goals in conjunction with leader support. Therefore, managers must provide a clear guideline and procedure regarding salary raises and performance evaluations or engage in thorough discourse on such matters with employees prior to announcements of such decisions. Moreover, as retail service employees interact with customers in the frontline, and how they serve customers plays a key role in creating customer loyalty. Managers should encourage retail service employees to engage in service-oriented behaviors.Originality/valueThe results suggest that LMX facilitates more formal task-related motivation to achieve either tasks or status while it is less related to relationship-building motivation, which is a unique contribution of this study. The results offer better understating of how LMX differentially leads to specific types of employee motivation in the existing literature.

A collaborative application of design thinking and Taguchi approach in restaurant service design for food wellbeing

PurposeInnovative restaurant service designs impart food wellbeing to diners. This research comprehends customer aspirations and concerns in a restaurant-dining experience to develop a service design that enhances the dining experience using the design thinking approach and evaluates its efficiency using the Taguchi method of robust design.Design/methodology/approachThe sequential incidence technique defines diners' needs, which, followed by brainstorming sessions, helped create multiple service designs with important attributes. Prototype narration, as a scenario, acted as the stimulus for evaluators to respond to the WHO-5 wellbeing index scale. Scenario-based Taguchi experiment with nine foodservice attributes in two levels and the wellbeing score as the response variable helped identify levels of critical factors that develop better FWB.FindingsThe study identified the best combination of factors and their preferred levels to maximize FWB in a restaurant. Food serving hygiene, followed by information about cuisine specification, and food movement in the restaurant, were important to FWB. The experiment revealed that hygiene perceptions are critical to FWB, and service designs have a significant role in it. Consumers prefer detailed information about the ingredients and recipe of the food they eat; being confident that there will be no unacceptable ingredients added to the food inspires their FWB.Research limitations/implicationsTheoretically, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on design thinking and transformative service research, especially in the food industry.Practical implicationsThis paper details a simple method to identify and evaluate important factors that optimize FWB in a restaurant. The proposed methodology will help service designers and technology experts devise settings that consider customer priorities and contribute to their experience.Originality/valueThis study helps to understand the application of design thinking and the Taguchi approach for creating robust service designs that optimize FWB.

“Going on a sensory adventure, a touchy subject?”: investigating haptic technology and consumer adventure orientation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to extend service and retailers understanding of how the inclusion of haptics can gamify digital service experiences. Second, it seeks to understand the moderating role of consumers orientation towards adventure in service experiences.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts a two-study, 2 (haptic technology: present vs absent) × 2 (adventure orientation: high vs low) to test the proposed hypotheses (Study 1 n = 210, Study 2 n = 452). The data are tested using ANCOVA's and Hayes PROCESS Macro to investigate mean differences and the potential presence of two different moderated mediated relationships.FindingsThe results are consistent across the two experimental studies evidencing that the inclusion of haptics to gamify the service experience leads to significantly improved outcomes for service brands and channels. Further, the results demonstrate that the impact of haptics is greater for consumers with a lower, compared to higher, sense of adventure. Thus, the results demonstrate that whilst haptics improves consumers experiences with technological services overall, this is more prevalent for those who have “less sense of adventure”.Originality/valueThis paper sheds insight into the emerging area of haptic technology and is one of the first to specifically examine the impact of consumers “sense of adventure.”

The link between extraversion and service outputs: a moderated mediation model of work vigor and coworker support

PurposeBased on the broaden-and-build theory, this study aims to clarify that the relationship between extraversion and service outcomes will be mediated by work vigor, and that, in turn, this mediating effect will be moderated by coworker support. Specifically, the authors examine vigor as an attitudinal resource to drive organizational performance.Design/methodology/approachThis research collected 181 valid questionnaires from service industries through a two-wave survey. The authors used hierarchical regression analysis to conduct each hypothesis test. Owing to the conditional mediating effect, the authors differentiated each variable centering and used the fractional number and the product as the predictor variable, moderator, and interaction effects after centering.FindingsThe relationships between extraversion and customer orientation and service performance mediated by work vigor in that the indirect relationships are stronger when perceived coworker support is higher than is lower.Research limitations/implicationsFuture studies are suggested to probe into different forms of social support (e.g. family support), mechanisms of coworker support (e.g. task-related vs. non-task-related assistance), and different workplace contexts.Practical implicationsExtraversion, as a personality trait, is a significant reference index to examine an applicant's qualifications during recruitment, particularly in service organizations. Appropriate job assistance and emotional conciliation from coworkers can effectively facilitate employees' work vigor and service outputs.Originality/valuePrevious studies suggested the influence of different personality traits on different dimensions of work engagement. Accordingly, investigation indicates that extraversion can effectively predict work vigor which is an important attitude of willingness to put personal efforts at work to facilitate frontline service outcomes.