Special Session 1
Humanity in Service Work During a Time of Digital Transformation – Proposer Mahesh Subramony
Background and Aim of the Proposal: Disruptive advances in digitization, automation, and artificial intelligence are transforming the organizational frontlines by multiplying the interfaces and modes of interaction between organizations and their customers (Singh et al., 2017; van Doorn et al., 2023). As opposed to technological innovations in the past that fostered process efficiencies while highlighting the importance of employee-customer relationships, emerging agentic technology allows for the substitution or elimination of human interaction (Arnold & Marinova, 2023; Subramony et al., 2023). However, there is also evidence that customers continue to value humanness and emotional connections (in addition to immediacy and efficiency) within their service experience (Ostrom et al., 2021; Field et al., 2021). This raises a critical question: what should be the role of human workers (employees) in this rapidly evolving technology-driven service landscape? The aim of this special session is to explore this question and generate an interactive and thought-provoking discussion on future directions for research and practice within this domain.
Session Format. The proposed session will consist of: (a) three presentations that will highlight three themes in humanizing services [30 minutes], (b) an expert panel comprised of three scholars who examine the humanity-technology interface from unique standpoints (hospitality, strategic human resource management, and marketing) [45 minutes], and (c) interactive question-answer session with audience members.
Key Themes:
(a) Emerging employee competencies in the context of ubiquitous technology. Importance of various employee competencies that either complement technology or differentiate human-performed service from technology-interactions (e.g., accurate reading of emotions, responsiveness to varying customer needs, empathy, and emotional regulation).
(b) Differentiation through humanity in personalized services. Discussion of organizational structures and systems that dehumanize the customer experience and exploration of ways to increase humanness in organization-customer interactions.
(c) Actualizing the potential of human-technology (HUMTECH) synergies. Focus on the sociotechnical drivers of HUMTECH synergies, i.e., ways in which the interactions between frontline technology and employee effort can be combined in a seamless way to deliver enhanced customer experience.
Special Session 2
Serving the Human Needs of Refugees: Creating a Logic for Sharing the Earth A ServCollab Special Session – Proposer Raymond Fisk
The modern refugee crisis is the result of chronic service system failures. There are more refugees today than ever, but systems for helping refugees are overwhelmed or completely lacking. To make this crisis appalling worse, many nations are using dehumanizing strategies to block refugees from being able to seek asylum in their country. Such national behaviors are creating a serving humanity crisis throughout the world. To make these conditions more alarming, Vince (2022) has presented compelling logic that global warming trends will accelerate the refugee crisis. She argues that “… we need a globally managed effort that recognizes our shared humanity on this shared earth – we need lawful, safe, planned and facilitated migration.”
For this special session, ServCollab will invite service research scholars who have studied the service system problems that worsen the refugee crisis and NGO refugee agency leaders who work directly with refugees seeking asylum. Since the QUIS conference will take place in Rome in 2025, we will focus most of our attention on the needs of refugees who perilously journey across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum. We will invite the founder of Agenzia Habeshia, Dr. Abba Mussie Zerai Yosief. Dr. Yosief is a childhood friend of Samuel Sebhatu, a professor at Karlstad University in Sweden who works with ServCollab. Agenzia Habeshia is an Italian refugee agency based in Rome. We also hope to invite refugee agency representatives from Greece and Spain.
ServCollab was established in 2018 as a human services organization for “Serving Humanity Through Collaboration.” Serving humanity is a broad purpose statement, leading to ServCollab developing research projects that establish foundational logic to help future researchers collaborate on solving various problems related to serving humanity. The first published research project was titled “Rethinking Service Systems and Public Policy: A Transformative Refugee Service Experience Framework.” That framework presented refugees’ suffering or well-being as caused by hostile or hospitable refugee service systems. Currently, ServCollab is doing research with a British NGO Refugee Agency to help them improve their refugee services.
Special Session 3
Digital health innovation: co-creating value, well-being, and health in an interconnected world – Proposer Erik Wastlund
In this special session, the aim is to further explore the challenges in creating tomorrow’s digital health services.
Digital health innovations have the potential to improve the health and well-being for citizens and at the same time reduce the financial burden of the public healthcare sector. Given the current demographic development, with an aging population, digital health innovations will play an increasingly important role in any future society. Even though the digital transformation of health and well-being services is already underway, the adoption rate of novel technology in health care is outpaced by the increase in service demands.
Why is it important from a service research perspective? Service research focuses on how citizens (i.e. users, patients) co-create value, well-being, and health and how this occurs in an interconnected world implies an important challenge.
A crucial aspect of digital health services is that they imply an opportunity to empower citizens to co-create their own health and well-being. Given the many barriers to adoption, it is necessary to build on the key enablers for successful service innovation and service delivery.
To successfully implement such services, it is paramount to understand the cyclic nature of digital health innovations. First of all, data has to be collected: digital health innovations typically build on real-time data being collected utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) or wearables. Secondly, by pooling a given individual’s data with that of all users it is possible to deliver data-driven personalized services. Thirdly, digital services can be delivered in a multitude of ways including health applications on smartphones as well as through social robots while at the same time collecting data to further personalize the service. On top of this cyclic process of digital innovations lies the citizen or patient experience. The rate of adoption of digital health services can only be increased by allowing for citizens to co-create value.
Keywords: Service research; Data-driven service innovation; IoT-based eHealth services: User experience of digital health services; Health applications; Social robots.