Special Issue on "Smart services, The move to customer-orientation"

A collection that covers typical service industries such as banking, healthcare, education or travel. These service industries have shown that value is created in the interaction between service providers and service consumers. The diffusion of advanced information technologies from web services, electronic market platforms and mobile solutions to smart computers has brought them more directly to the users. They enable customers or patients not only to retrieve and contract relevant offerings, but also to configure them according to their individual preferences. However, existing services often still follow an inside-out instead of an outside-in logic. They are designed from the perspective of a specific service provider and fail to support the bundling and coordination of services across multiple service providers. While transactions with individual service providers have been successfully implemented in many solutions, the bundling and tracking of service bundles across service providers, such as banks, hospitals or transportation companies, requires substantial coordination on behalf of the customer today. This collection aims to contribute to the understanding of how (smart) services contribute in realizing an outside-in perspective as well as “empowered” customers.