New Issues and Opportunities in Service Design Research

In an era of intense high-speed competition, offering to the marketplace a sustainable and profitable value proposition that effectively leverages a firm’s financial, human, and operational resources is critical to both established and emerging businesses. To complicate matters further, in emerging industries such as e-services, customers often do not know what they want or need, consequently limiting a the company’s ability to engineer market-winning product–service solutions. While companies develop their own strategies to compete effectively in the “new” new economy, this competitive environment offers many opportunities to scholars interest in studying services. For example, should an enterprise merely try to adapt to the e-services marketplace? Should it keep juggling with the endless list of alternative service offerings? Or should it strive to shape the future of the business environment within which it operates by offering innovative product–service bundles

Eco-efficiency of Service Co-production: Connecting Eco-certifications and Resource Efficiency in U.S. Hotels

This study investigates the relationship between eco-certifications (second or third party certified with an audit requirement) and resource efficiency in the U.S. hotel industry. Hotel properties become eco-certified by voluntarily conforming to environmental practice guidelines established by a certifying body, which assesses and recognizes the properties that meet their criteria. Eco-certifications therefore are key environmental sustainability initiatives that address both the internal operations and external customers. Based on regression analysis of 2,893 U.S. hotel properties for the year 2011, this analysis shows that eco-certified hotels maintain higher operational efficiency, as well as greater customer-driven resource efficiency, in comparison with properties with lesser or no eco-certifications. These results suggest that eco-certifications influence the resource consumption behavior of both the operators and the customers, although these effects are not consistent for all properties. The improvement from the operational effect is most pronounced in lower-tier properties, while the customer efficiency effect is most noticeable in upper-tier properties

Managing Services Using Techology Ti Create Value

443hal.;xvii.;24c

Operations Management Integrating Manufacturing And Services

677 hal.;xxxix.;25c

Managing services: using technology to create value

xvii, 443 hal.; 23 c

A Life-Cycle Perspective of Professionalism in Services

We explore one prolific type of service triad, the franchise triad, involving three primary stakeholders: the franchisor, the franchisee and the customer. In this triad, franchisees use their affiliation with the franchisor’s brand to attract customers to their local outlets. In exchange for the right of assuming the identity of the brand, the franchisee pays the franchisor royalties and retains residual profits. Applying Agency Theory, this paper examines the inherent conflict of interests between a principal (i.e., franchisor) that controls and manages brand equity as a shared resource and an agent (i.e., franchisee) that retains pricing right and profits from the identity of the brand by interacting directly with customers. We empirically isolate the effect of triad structure on outlet performance by matching two unique datasets. One set of data captures operational performance in the form of aggregated online review scores and the other financial performance including average daily hotel rate and revenue per available room. We find that franchisees charge higher prices than their corporate counterparts even when controlling for operational performance. Even though franchisees charge higher prices they maintain similar financial performance in terms of revenue per available room. These results suggest that the triad structure plays a significant role in franchisees\u27 ability to free-ride on shared brand equity and have important managerial implications for effective outsourcing, contract design and performance evaluation for a wide range of service industries

Exploring the Relationship between Eco-certifications and Resource Efficiency in U.S. Hotels

This study examines the impact of eco-certifications on two aspects of resource efficiency in hotel operations—operational efficiency and guest-driven efficiency. We analyze the effect of the Travelocity.com’s ecoleaf label, which designates hotels that have received eco-certification from any of several organizations. To earn the ecoleaf, the certification must be from a second or third party and must be available for audit. We analyze the relationship between eco-certifications and resource efficiency driven by both operations and customers. Using a large scale dataset from PKF Hospitality Research on the U.S. hotel industry, we found that eco-certified hotels recorded higher operations-driven and customer-driven resource efficiency. While the specific ratios vary according to a hotel’s chain scale, it’s clear that this group of U.S. hotels benefited from earning certification