Purpose

The marketing literature on service conversation in dyadic services has elaborated two approaches. An advisory approach involves providers giving customers expert advice on how to advance difficult projects. By contrast, a relational approach involves providers exchanging social support with customers to develop commercial friendships. Inspired by the transformative turn in service research, this study aims to develop a third approach, one that helps customers to cultivate their own agency, potential and well-being.

Design/methodology/approach

The emergent model of service conversation is based on in-depth interviews with providers and clients of mental health services, including psychological counseling, psychotherapy and personal coaching.

Findings

A transformative approach to service conversation involves the iterative application of a complementary pair of conversational practices: seeding microtransformations by asking questions to inspire new ways of thinking, feeling and acting; and nurturing microtransformations via non-evaluative listening to affirm customers’ explorations of new possibilities. This pair of practices immediately elevates customers’ sense of psychological freedom, which, in turn, enables their process of self-transformation, one microtransformation at a time.

Practical implications

This study offers dyadic service providers a conceptual framework of advisory, relational and transformative approaches to service conversation for instrumental, communal and developmental service encounters, respectively. This framework can help dyadic service providers to conduct more collaborative, flexible and productive conversations with their customers.

Originality/value

Three approaches to service conversation – advisory, relational and transformative – are conceptually distinguished in terms of their overall aims, provider practices, customer experiences, customer outcomes, allocations of airtime, designations of expertise, application contexts, prototypical examples and blind spots.

中文翻译：

---

服务对话：咨询、关系和变革方法

目的

关于二元服务中的服务对话的营销文献阐述了两种方法。咨询方法涉及供应商就如何推进困难项目向客户提供专家建议。相比之下，关系方法涉及提供商与客户交换社会支持以发展商业友谊。受到服务研究变革性转变的启发，本研究旨在开发第三种方法，一种帮助客户培养自己的能动性、潜力和幸福感的方法。

设计/方法/方法

服务对话的紧急模式基于对心理健康服务提供者和客户的深入访谈，包括心理咨询、心理治疗和个人辅导。

发现

服务对话的变革性方法涉及一对互补的对话实践的迭代应用：通过提出问题以激发新的思维、感觉和行为方式来播种微转变；并通过非评估性倾听来培养微转变，以肯定客户对新可能性的探索。这对做法立即提升了客户的心理自由感，从而使他们能够进行自我转变，一次一个微转变。

实际影响

本研究为二元服务提供者提供了一个概念框架，其中包括咨询、关系和变革方法，以分别针对工具性、公共性和发展性服务接触进行服务对话。该框架可以帮助二元服务提供商与其客户进行更多协作、灵活和富有成效的对话。

原创性/价值

三种服务对话方法——咨询、关系和变革——在概念上在总体目标、提供商实践、客户体验、客户成果、通话时间分配、专业知识指定、应用上下文、原型示例和盲点方面有所不同。