Customer-perceived service wellbeing in a transformative framework: Research propositions in the area of health services

Customer-perceived service wellbeing (CPSW) refers to a positive response resulting from the experiential, relational, processual, and interactive character of a service or service situation that contributes to individual customer wellbeing and broader societal wellbeing. This paper aims to offer a conceptual model of the relationships between the wellbeing-focused dimensions of a firm’s activities and CPSW. Building on scholarly insights from the marketing logic and transformative service research (TSR) literature, the paper develops a series of research propositions to articulate the relationships in the conceptual framework. On the basis of the literature review, five wellbeing-focused dimensions of a firm’s activities have been identified as antecedents to CPSW and five customer factors have been identified as potential moderators of the relationship between the wellbeing-focused dimensions and CPSW. This paper reveals arguments in the existing literature to promote a deeper understanding of the impact of the firm’s wellbeing-focused activities on CPSW in light of moderating effects of customers’ psychological and behavioral characteristics. The managerial implication resulting from the framework and the propositions presented here is that managers and service providers need to identify and understand both the wellbeing-focused dimensions of their business and the psychological and behavioral characteristics of their customers; in healthcare services, specifically, both are necessary in order to improve CPSW. This paper highlights a new perspective to better understand the mechanisms of transformative service design that firms should pursue to influence CPSW. This paper offers a theoretical framework depicting how CPSW is generated through the effective unification of the roles of businesses and customers in the context of healthcare services and provides researchers with a new outlook for the development of a multidisciplinary societal wellbeing model.