Title: Increasing the intensity of customer involvement in a service process

Authors: Pini Davidov; Shlomo Globerson; Inessa Ainbinder

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Azrieli Academic College of Engineering, Jerusalem, Israel; UNEC Cognitive Economic Center, Azerbaijan State University of Economics, Baku, Azerbaijan ' Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University, Israel ' Azrieli College of Engineering, Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract: The intensity of self-service technologies is increasing in supermarkets, banking, insurance, flight check-in, etc. This trend is mostly due to advances in digitalisation and automation. A major decision in designing a hybrid-service system is to determine the number of servers (e.g., cashiers) and the number of self-service stations to be included in the checkout system. These decisions affect both the level of service given to the customer as measured by amount of time that the customer spends in the system, and the organisational operational cost. This article, using waiting line theory, examines considerations such as customer arrival pattern, service time, operational cost, learning, and forgetting, that should be taken into account when designing a checkout system. The article presents various examples that use quantitative methods to evaluate the impact of possible configurations of cashier and self-service stations.

Keywords: service companies; self-service; waiting time; level of service; operational cost; performance; learning curves; forgetting curves.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2024.141413

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2024 Vol.49 No.1, pp.91 - 110

Received: 19 Apr 2022
Accepted: 15 Jul 2022
Published online: 12 Sep 2024 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article