Designing transformative services: how to create services that promote well-being

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Hollaender, Paulo Sodre
• Orientador(a): Santos, Juliana Bonomi
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Serviços transformativos; Design de serviços; Bem-estar social
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Transformative Service Research (TSR); Service design; Well-being
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/33979

Traditionally, the target of service operations have been managerial outcomes, such as profit, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word of mouth. Over the years, services have become so critical to social life that it is almost inevitable to recognize their impact on human welfare, and these types of outcomes are no longer sufficient to manage services performance and success. Reflecting this change, a new service research approach that focuses on socially bound outcomes has gained force and drawn attention of both managers and academics. Created from the fusion of marketing and operations researches that explore the promotion of well-being outcomes by service organizations, the Transformative Service Research (TSR) is the research field that investigates how interactions between consumer and service entities generate wellbeing outcomes and create uplifting changes for both. Although basic aspects of TSR have already been established, such as focus on vulnerable populations, up to now, the service research community is yet to achieve consensus on what are transformative services and how to design services that promote well-being. The purpose of this research is to push forward the evolution of TSR by developing a general definition of transformative services and understanding how services can be designed to promote well-being. To do that, two research approaches were implemented. First, a theoretical approach investigated distinctive traits and defining features of transformative services to identify what they are. Second, a theory-driven empirical investigation was conducted to develop and validate a new method of design for the creation of transformative services. The proposed method answers the research question: how to design services that promote well-being? The findings, results, contributions and implications of this research were organized in three papers, each of them presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the this thesis. When considered together, all three papers reveal what transformative services are and what should be done to design them. Here, two important steps were made. First, the definition of transformative services provides a unit of analysis for future investigations in both TSR and traditional research fields. The idea that transformative services are a unit of analyses that emerges from TSR allows traditional researchers from the fields of production and operations management (POM), service operations management (SOM), and marketing to contribute to TSR from their usual viewpoints, without adopting a transformative perspective. Second, the proposed design method takes basic premises for the design of transformative services into account and organizes the design process in five stages.