Healthcare service experiences: a customer-dominant review

Purpose – This paper aims to synthesises contemporary research on service experience, focusing on health care as a domain where experiences are consequential, emotionally charged and temporally layered. It integrates fragmented perspectives into a temporal and lifeworld-based understanding of patient value.
Design/methodology/approach – A critical integrative review traces the evolution of customer value and service experience perspectives within health care and beyond. The review compares service-dominant logic (SDL), service logic (SL) and customer-dominant logic (CDL), and integrates temporal mechanisms (valueas-experience, mental time travel and affective forecasting) to provide a coherent foundation for understanding healthcare journeys.
Findings – The synthesis clarifies how SDL provides systemic scope; SL explains interactional value creation and CDL situates value formation within the customer’s lifeworld. Three temporal mechanisms add the time dimension. Value-as-experience conceptualises value as lived, remembered and imagined; mental time travel explains how patients revisit past encounters and simulate anticipated futures; affective forecasting shows how emotional expectations shape engagement and evaluation. These perspectives indicate that the patient’s experience unfolds as an evolving narrative rather than as isolated events, continuously constructed, interpreted and revised across the journey.
Originality/value – The paper advances an integrative perspective connecting service logics with temporal mechanisms to explain how patients construct, interpret and revise value across the healthcare journey. It foregrounds memory, anticipation and reflection as central to value formation and outlines a research agenda for longitudinal, interpretive and patient-centred approaches.