Customers and providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention maximizes customer engagement and improves outcomes. Alternatively, shared service delivery, in which customers are served in...

Innovations that radically redefine how a service is delivered can create tremendous value for customers and for providers. But they require deep insight into clients' needs and the revising of basic assumptions. It's possible, for example, that a doctor can treat more than one patient at a...