Does service‐dominant design result in a better service system?

Purpose – Few empirical studies have been conducted to explore the mechanisms and drivers of service exchange and value co‐creation. In particular, no study has compared a service system design informed by service‐dominant logic (SDL) with a service system design informed by goods‐dominant logic (GDL). The purpose of this paper is to address this knowledge gap. The research question is: does a service‐dominant system design result in a more favourable customer experience than a goods‐dominant service system?Design/methodology/approach – An experiment was carried out on a group of habitual bus travellers. The subjects were asked to plan a specific journey using two online journey planning systems. Two hypotheses were tested: first, an SDL informed service system will evoke a better overall customer experience than a GDL informed service system. Second, this better customer experience arises out of seven service system design characteristics. Both objective and subjective data were gathered to compare the c...