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Article
Publication date: 16 October 2023

Jan Hendrik Blümel, Mohamed Zaki and Thomas Bohné

Customer service conversations are becoming increasingly digital and automated, leaving service encounters impersonal. The purpose of this paper is to identify how customer…

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Abstract

Purpose

Customer service conversations are becoming increasingly digital and automated, leaving service encounters impersonal. The purpose of this paper is to identify how customer service agents and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) applications can provide a personal touch and improve the customer experience in customer service. The authors offer a conceptual framework delineating how text-based customer service communication should be designed to increase relational personalization.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents a systematic literature review on conversation styles of conversational AI and integrates the extant research to inform the development of the proposed conceptual framework. Using social information processing theory as a theoretical lens, the authors extend the concept of relational personalization for text-based customer service communication.

Findings

The conceptual framework identifies conversation styles, whose degree of expression needs to be personalized to provide a personal touch and improve the customer experience in service. The personalization of these conversation styles depends on available psychological and individual customer knowledge, contextual factors such as the interaction and service type, as well as the freedom of communication the conversational AI or customer service agent has.

Originality/value

The article is the first to conduct a systematic literature review on conversation styles of conversational AI in customer service and to conceptualize critical elements of text-based customer service communication required to provide a personal touch with conversational AI. Furthermore, the authors provide managerial implications to advance customer service conversations with three types of conversational AI applications used in collaboration with customer service agents, namely conversational analytics, conversational coaching and chatbots.

Details

Journal of Service Theory and Practice, vol. 34 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2055-6225

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Article
Publication date: 13 September 2024

Hendrik Winzer, Tor Kristian Stevik, Kaspar Akilles Lilja, Therese Seljevold and Joachim Scholderer

Tactical capacity planning is crucial when hospitals must cope with substantial changes in patient requirements, as recently experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. However…

96

Abstract

Purpose

Tactical capacity planning is crucial when hospitals must cope with substantial changes in patient requirements, as recently experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there is only little understanding of the nature of capacity limitations in a hospital, which is essential for effective tactical capacity planning.

Design/methodology/approach

We report a detailed analysis of capacity limitations at a Norwegian tertiary public hospital and conducted 22 in-depth interviews. The informants participated in capacity planning and decision-making during the Covid-19 pandemic. Data are clustered into categories of capacity limitations and a correspondence analysis provides additional insights.

Findings

Personnel and information were the most mentioned types of capacity limitations, and middle management and organizational functions providing specialized treatment felt most exposed to capacity limitations. Further analysis reveals that capacity limitations are dynamic and vary across hierarchical levels and organizational functions.

Research limitations/implications

Future research on tactical capacity planning should take interdisciplinary patient pathways better into account as capacity limitations are dynamic and systematically different for organizational functions and hierarchical levels.

Practical implications

We argue that our study possesses common characteristics of tertiary public hospitals, including professional silos and fragmentation of responsibilities along patient pathways. Therefore, we recommend operations managers in hospitals to focus more on intra-organizational information flows to increase the agility of their organization.

Originality/value

Our detailed capacity limitation analysis at a tertiary public hospital in Norway during the Covid-19 pandemic provides novel insights into the nature of capacity limitations, which may enhance tactical capacity planning.

Details

Journal of Health Organization and Management, vol. 39 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1477-7266

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