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OM Forum—Managing Customer Experiences: Perspectives on the Temporal Aspects of Service Encounters

Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
School of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
IESE Business School, Universidad De Navarra, 08034, Barcelona, Spain
gbitran{at}mit.edu
jferrer{at}ing.puc.cl
paulo{at}iese.edu

Aservice encounter is an experience that extends over time. Therefore, its effective management must include the control of the timing of the delivery of each of the service's elements and the enhancement of the customer's experience between and during the delivery of the various elements. This paper provides a conceptual framework that links the duration of a service encounter to behaviors that have been shown to affect profitability. Analysis of the framework reveals a wide gap between the behavioral assumptions typically made in operations research (OR) and operations management (OM) models and the state of the art in the marketing and psychology literature. The central motivations behind this paper are (1) to help the OR and OM community bridge this gap by bringing to its attention recent findings from the behavioral literature that have implications for the design of queueing systems for service firms and (2) to identify opportunities for further research.

Key Words: psychology of waiting; marketing/operations interface; queueing; behavioral operations management; service encounters; service operations management; services marketing
History: Received: July 12, 2005; accepted: November 27, 2006.