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PurposeTo determine the impact of service recovery on consumer evaluations of service delivery.Design/methodology/approachAn experiment investigated consumer responses to three dimensions of perceived fairness of recovery efforts: redress, responsiveness, and empathy/courtesy.FindingsResults revealed that higher levels of redress independently increase positive consumer responses. It was further found that the interaction of employee responsiveness and courtesy can also have a dramatic impact on consumer evaluations. Satisfaction was highest and negative word‐of‐mouth (WOM) intentions were lowest only under conditions of high responsiveness and courtesy. Additionally, an interaction between courtesy and tangible rewards significantly decreased the level of negative WOM.Practical implicationsThe research offers empirical support for the “service recovery paradox” suggesting effective post‐recovery efforts may not only counteract bad service experiences, but may increase satisfaction beyond levels held before the service failure.Originality/valueKey elements for the proper structuring of a service recovery process are identified for management.

Offers a fresh outlook for managing the delicate interaction between the customer and the contact employee in the service environment. Emphasizes that the quality of the customer‐employee interfacehas a great effect on customers′ perceptions of the quality and value of the service, as well as on their satisfaction. Suggests a model of how companies can improve this interface by treating employees ascustomers and customers as employees, thus developing lower cost and higher quality services and also higher levels of satisfaction on the part of both customers and employees. Recommends various steps for management to take.

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

PurposeThe purpose of this conceptual paper is to show how a company can improve the interface by treating employees as customers and customers as employees.Design/methodology/approachThis article presents a conceptual model (reinforced with a review of extant literature and numerous examples) demonstrating the desirable consequences associated with the phenomenon we refer to as “trading places,” which occurs when organizations mix the treatment and roles of employees and customers.FindingsTraditionally organizations have treated employees and customers as separate constituencies. Operations and human resource managers have developed their own approach to deal with employees (e.g. as “resources” to be utilized), while marketing managers have related to customers through somewhat different lenses (e.g. viewing customers as “prizes” to be won). Yet, in service organizations, we find that as employees assume more customer‐like roles and customers increasingly resemble employees, successful organizations are drawing from both approaches – treating employees more like customers, while treating customers more like employees.Practical implicationsAs a conceptual piece, this article presents an alternative way of thinking about organizations' relationships with their employees and customers. Particularly relevant to service environments, it shows how organizations, employees, and customers all benefit when the “trading places” phenomenon is recognized.Originality/valueThe article updates the “trading places” perspective by reviewing relevant literature, providing a conceptual model, and illustrating the application of the approach with numerous examples.

Purpose Patients with head-and-neck cancer (HNC) may experience xerostomia after radiation therapy (RT), which leads to compromised quality of life. The purpose of this study is to explore how the spatial pattern of radiation dose (radiomorphology) in the major salivary glands influences xerostomia in patients with HNC. Methods and materials A data-driven approach using spatially explicit dosimetric predictors, voxel dose (ie, actual radiation dose in voxels in parotid glands [PG] and submandibular glands [SMG]) was used to predict whether patients would develop xerostomia 3 months after RT. Using planned radiation dose data and other nondose covariates including baseline xerostomia grade of 427 patients with HNC in our database, the machine learning methods were used to investigate the influence of dose patterns across subvolumes in PG and SMG on xerostomia. Results Of the 3 supervised learning methods studied, ridge logistic regression yielded the best predictive performance. Ridge logistic regression was also preferred to evaluate the influence pattern of highly correlated dose on xerostomia, which showed a discriminative pattern of influence of doses in the PG and SMG on xerostomia. Moreover, the superior–anterior portion of the contralateral PG and medial portion of the ipsilateral PG were determined to be the most influential regions regarding dose effect on xerostomia. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve from a 10-fold cross-validation was 0.70 ± 0.04. Conclusions Radiomorphology, combined with machine learning methods, is able to suggest patterns of dose in PG and SMG that are the most influential on xerostomia. The influence pattern identified by this data-driven approach and machine learning methods may help improve RT treatment planning and reduce xerostomia after treatment.

Xerostomia is a common consequence of radiotherapy in head and neck cancer. The objective was to compare the regional radiation dose distribution in patients that developed xerostomia within 6 months of radiotherapy and those recovered from xerostomia within 18 months post-radiotherapy. We developed a feature generation pipeline to extract dose volume histogram features from geometrically defined ipsilateral/contralateral parotid glands, submandibular glands, and oral cavity surrogates for each patient. Permutation tests with multiple comparisons were performed to assess the dose difference between injury vs. non-injury and recovery vs. non-recovery. Ridge logistic regression models were applied to predict injury and recovery using clinical features along with dose features (D10-D90) of the subvolumes extracted from oral cavity and salivary gland contours + 3 mm peripheral shell. Model performances were assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) using nested cross-validation. We found that different regional dose/volume metrics patterns exist for injury vs. recovery. Compared to injury, recovery has increased importance to the subvolumes receiving lower dose. Within the subvolumes, injury tends to have increased importance towards D10 from D90. This suggests that different threshold for xerostomia injury and recovery. Injury is induced by the subvolumes receiving higher dose, and the ability to recover can be preserved by further reducing the dose to subvolumes receiving lower dose.