The Customers’ Role in Sustainable Supply Chain Management in Services
A mushrooming customer segment rewards firms for their sustainable practices with loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, increased firm image, and repeat purchases (Lee et al. 2010; Moeller, Dolnicar, and Leisch 2011). The challenge (but also opportunity) for service firms is to meet these customer demands and to manage the customer involvement in service operations without compromising service quality and by simultaneously meeting the firms’ financial and strategic
objectives. One well-documented issue is that customers usually associate sustainability with sacrifices of comfort, time, or money, and so the customers’ acceptance of these trade-offs is a prerequisite to achieving sustainability (McKercher and Prideaux 2011). Hence, successful sustainable management in tourism requires the customers’ cooperation and partnership