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. The well-known distinctive time-based nature of service firms’ products complicates their sustainable management efforts (Kassinis and Soteriou 2003; Sigala 2008). Most critically, services’ slack capacity and unused resources represent a type of waste that can also have environmental impacts, such as lost energy, and sociocultural impacts, such as lost working hours and reduced employee motivation and morale (Foster, Sampson, and Dunn 2000). Driven by customers’ diverse needs and preferences, the heterogeneity in service production systems increases their operational complexity and the variety of the required resources. This, in turn, may result in resources’ underutilization and waste that reduce sustainability (Kassinis and Soteriou 2003). Although managers can attempt to counteract this issue through service standardization, low customer adoption rates of standardized services may themselves result in wasted resources (i.e., unneeded services being offered).