guest article by Gabriela Beirão and Lia Patrício
The service environment is increasingly complex, with service provider networks interacting with customer networks. For example in health care, citizens may choose different health service providers (e.g. private and public health professionals, therapists), search health related information on online social networks, and integrate all this information to take care of their health. This increased complexity is important for both researchers and service managers, as they need to have a holistic view of the customer value networks and how their service offering fits into their value cocreation processes.
In this context, service managers must go beyond managing their interaction with customers, (e.g. interactions between the patient and the hospital), to a broader understanding of how their service facilitates customer value creation, not just with the service provider, but also with the other actors in the customer network (Vargo et al. 2008). The service should therefore enable the customer to integrate multiple resources from other customers and service provider value networks. For example, to provide good health care service, a hospital needs to understand how its service fits into the patient’s value network (e.g. family, community, other healthcare providers, insurance companies), and to design its service offering to facilitate the integration of different network resources to improve patient’s health and well-being.
Electronic Health records are a good example of how services can enable value cocreation among value networks. EHRs are digital repositories of patient health data (ISO 2004). They can significantly improve health care services, by making patient information available to different health care practitioners in distinct services and locations. This information sharing provides a more comprehensive understanding of the patient health condition, reduces the need for exams and enables a more accurate diagnosis and treatment. However, to achieve these objectives, the EHR must be fed with information registered by the patient and the different health professionals, such as doctors and nurses. This implies that EHR service should enable value cocreation in its interactions with the patient, ensuring data security and privacy. It should also facilitate the value cocreation interactions among patients, physicians and other health care practitioners, by enabling information registration and sharing. Thus, the sucess of the network depends on inputs from actors, such as health care professionals and patients’ own inputs (Pinho et al. 2014).
Designing and managing services as facilitators of value cocreation interactions between customers and their value networks is important, not only for health care, but also for other service sectors. With technology infusion, customers and their devices are now always connected, through smart technologies, wearable devices, social networks, creating a revolutionary, ubiquitous interaction context (Ostrom et al. 2015). In this context, it is increasingly important to understand how service offerings, such as banking or retailing, fit into customer value networks, and how they can enable customers to cocreate value through these many to many interactions.
The upcoming QUIS15 conference takes a broad interdisciplinary and international view of service excellence in management addressing, among others, the topics discussed above. Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit an abstract until November 15th for consideration for presentation at QUIS15. The conference is organized by the University of Porto, in Porto, Portugal, June 12-15, 2017. Check the conference website on www.fe.up.pt/quis15 and follow all the conference updates on QUIS15 Facebook page on https://www.facebook.com/QUIS2017.
Gabriela Beirão is an Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the University of Porto and INESCTEC
Lia Patrício is an Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the University of Porto
References
ISO. 2004. “Iso/Dtr 20514 – Health Informatics – Electronic Health Record – Definition, Scope, and Context.” ISO, Geneva, Switzerland.
Ostrom, A. L., Parasuraman, A., Bowen, D. E., Patrício, L., and Voss, C. A. 2015. “Service Research Priorities in a Rapidly Changing Context,” Journal of Service Research (18:2), pp. 127-159.
Pinho, N., Beirão, G., Patrício, L., and Fisk, R. P. 2014. “Understanding Value Co-Creation in Complex Services with Many Actors,” Journal of Service Management (25:4), pp. 470-493.
Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., and Akaka, M. A. 2008. “On Value and Value Co-Creation: A Service Systems and Service Logic Perspective,” European Management Journal (26:3), pp. 145-152.
Photo: Nichole Burrows
