Purpose: The customer contact approach to service has been at the core of service theory since the 1970s. It suggests that the potential operating efficiency of a service is inversely related to the extent of customer contact with the provider's operations and that various service design issues...

The impact of business operations on the natural environment has been a public concern for decades and a research concern for years. To date, the focus of environmental impact research has been almost exclusively on manufacturing industries. Environmental research specific to service industries...

Purpose – Much has been written about the manifestations and managerial implications of customer co-production in service offerings. However, there have been relatively few references to issues of co-production in international service environments. Co-production is very relevant in...

This paper explores a technique for developing a conference (or class) schedule that maximizes the servicing of participant requests for sessions. Data regarding participant interests are collected before the time the schedule is generated. The problem contains two principal parts: (1) to...

Services and products possess various attributes, some being more important than others. Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is a technique for prioritising attributes based on measurements of performance and importance. A weakness of IPA is that it conceptualises attribute importance as a...

For many years companies have collected feedback from customers through means such as comment cards and toll‐free telephone numbers. The feedback data can be used by companies to track quality, locate quality problems, and identify suggestions for improvement. Gathering feedback from customers...