Purpose Following a contingency approach, this paper aims to understand when service automation can enhance or destroy value for customers in the frontline by (1) providing a comprehensive overview of factors that influence the value co-creation/co-destruction potential of service automation and (2) zooming in on the combination of service contexts and service tasks to develop research propositions

Purpose Understanding the outcomes of co-creation (CC) in healthcare is increasingly gaining multidisciplinary scientific interest. Although more and more service management scholars have pointed out the benefits of cross-fertilization between the various research fields, the literature on this topic is still scattered and poorly integrated. This study aims to summarize and integrate multiple strands

Purpose Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how perceptual information mediated by an online photo contributes

Purpose Profound economic, social, political and environmental problems are cascading across modern civilization in the 21st century. Many of these problems resulted from the prevailing effects of rational economics focused on profit maximization. The purpose of this paper is to reframe the mindsets of scholars, firms and public policy decision-makers through enabling Service Thinking practices. D

Purpose This article draws on a reasoned action perspective and the two fundamental dimensions (i.e. warmth and competence) of the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) to analyze customers' chatbot-related attitudes and usage intentions in service retailing. The authors investigate how chatbot, customer, and contextual characteristics, along with perceptions of chatbot warmth and competence, shape customers'

Purpose Employing a service-profit chain (S-PC) framework, this manuscript investigates the relationship between employee engagement (EE) and customer engagement (CE) within service contexts and explores how a mediating mechanism, service employee work performance (SEWP), links EE with CE. Design/methodology/approach Meta-analytic procedures ascertain the magnitude of the relationship between EE and

Purpose The study aims to explore how segmentation as a methodology can be adapted to the healthcare context to provide a more nuanced understanding of the served population and to facilitate the design of patient-centric services. Design/methodology/approach The study was based on a collaborative project with a national healthcare organization following the principles of action design research. The

Purpose Because new-age technologies are gaining a broader interest among service scholars and practitioners, it is critical to identify these technologies and examine the roles they play. The examination needs to be conducted to design engaging customer and service experiences in new phygital settings that connect physical and digital environments. This review article aims to provide researchers with

Purpose Service robots have increasingly been utilized in retail settings, yet empirical research on how frontline employees (FLEs) might deal with this new reality remains scarce. This mixed-methods study aims to examine how FLEs expect physical service robots to impact job characteristics and affect their job engagement and well-being. Design/methodology/approach First, explorative interviews (Study

Purpose To deliver superior customer experiences, retailers are increasingly turning to augmented reality (AR) technologies for new digital services that can enhance their customer interactions. The potential of AR has been validated in lab experiments, but when implemented in real-world contexts, its commercial impact has been limited. Therefore, this paper investigates how to design AR-based services

Purpose Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an increasingly important issue for service brands in fast fashion retailing, as consumers' negative impressions about retailers' CSR activities influence brand experience. Consumers' impressions of CSR efforts arise based on agendas communicated through many channels from different sources. The paper unravels the ‘wrinkles’, i.e. possible mismatches

Purpose The Covid-19 pandemic has a strong effect on societies, business and consumers. Governments have taken measures to reduce the spread of the pandemic, such as social distancing and lockdowns. The latter has also resulted in a temporary closure of physical stores for “non-essential” retailing. Covid-19 thus has a profound impact on how people live. The period of relative isolation, social distancing

Purpose Measurement scales for sensory experience in retailing exist for sight, touch and sound. In the present study, the authors aim to develop the olfactory experience (OEX) scale in the context of retailing. Design/methodology/approach Based on literature review and six studies that follow standard scale development protocols (combined n = 1,203), the authors develop and validate a three-dimensional

Purpose The aim of the paper is to bring together the state-of-the-art research and theory from the communication and service research fields to examine the implications of new technologies for the future of service communication. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply the media affordances perspective to develop an overarching framework that facilitates theoretical conceptualization and research

Purpose The authors explore the outcomes of health-care professionals' participation in a vendor-hosted online community by combining qualitative and quantitative data collected in two separate studies. The authors aim to shed light on the potential value outcomes of community participation covering the reduction of service costs by professionals' community participation. Design/methodology/approach

Purpose Digital advertising enables retailers to rely on large volumes of data on consumers and even leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to target consumers online with personalised and context-aware advertisements. One recent example of such advertisements is programmatic advertising (PA), which is facilitated by automatic bidding systems. Given that retailers are expected to increase their use

Purpose Social robots increasingly adopt service roles in the marketplace. While service research is beginning to unravel the implications for theory and practice, other scientific disciplines have amassed a wealth of empirical data of robots assuming such service roles. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize these findings from a role theory perspective with the aim of advancing role theory for

Purpose Over the last 50 years, increased attention for personalization paved the way for one-to-one marketing efforts, but firms struggle to deliver on this promise. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a complete picture on personalization, develop a future research agenda and put forth concrete advice on how to move the field forward from a theoretical, methodological, contextual, and practical

Purpose The authors develop and validate a conceptual model, the retirement engagement model (REM), to understand the relationships between behavioral engagement (retirement information search), cognitive factors and engagement (e.g. beliefs and financial knowledge), emotional engagement (e.g. anxiety), and socio-demographic factors. Approach: The authors derive the REM through a three-step procedure:

Purpose Today's sharing economy covers a variety of business models. This research aims to (1) identify dimensions along which sharing businesses may vary and (2) investigate how these dimensions influence consumer engagement while considering consumers' sustainability orientation. Design/methodology/approach This research relies upon a systematic literature review (n = 67 articles) to identify five

Purpose This tribute to Dr Pierre Eiglier, who passed in February 2020, was prepared for the “17th International Research Conference in Service Management 2022” in La Londe les Maures, France. Tribute is defined as, “an act, statement, or gift intended to show gratitude, respect, or admiration”. Design/methodology/approach Sampled Pierre's publications; consulted the 1993 Journal of Retailing “Special

Purpose This article proposes a new theoretical background against which to measure customer experience for omnichannel service deliveries and communications based on the concept of proximity. This represents a first step in developing a new measurement approach for omnichannel customer experience. Design/methodology/approach The methodological approach is based on literature review and theory development

Purpose The authors explore neuro-enhanced reality (NeR) as a novel approach for enhancing service communication between customers, frontline employees, and service organizations that extends beyond current state-of-the-art approaches based on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies. Design/methodology/approach The authors first take stock of research on reality-enhanced service

Purpose Artificial intelligence–enabled voice assistants (VAs), such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, are available in smartphones, smart speakers, and other digital devices and channels. Use of these VAs is growing rapidly and are expected to significantly impact purchase intentions. This article focuses on how the communications enabled and provided by these VAs influence VA

Purpose Recommender systems (RS) are designed to communicate with users and drive consumers' engagement with the platform. However, little is known about the strength of this relationship and how RS can create stronger consumer engagement (CE) with the platform brand. Addressing this gap, this paper examines the role of RS in converting consumers' short-term engagement with the RS to their longer-term

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight challenges for service firms communicating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts to customers. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between ESG metrics and reporting and customer perceptions of social innovativeness. Design/methodology/approach The empirical material comprises three years of data (2018–2020) covering more than 100

Purpose This paper highlights the potential of social activism – defined as a public act that aims to challenge the status quo by bringing alternative views or narratives to the debate – in transformative service research and proposes a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds upon a review of social activism in the management and communications literature to identify its

Purpose While robots have increasingly threatened frontline employees’ (FLEs) future employment by taking over more mechanical and analytical intelligence tasks, they are still unable to “experience” and “feel” to occupy empathetic intelligence tasks that can be handled better by FLEs. This study, therefore, aims to empirically develop and validate a scale measuring the new so-called empathetic creativity

Purpose Many service industries are facing severe labor shortages. As a result, service providers are turning to new sources of labor, such as service robots. Critics however often point out that service robots lack emotional communication capabilities without which they cannot be expected to truly replace human employees and fill the emerging labor market gaps. Here, a research agenda for the investigation

Purpose Building on Walter Benjamin's philosophical reflections on aura and authenticity, this article aims to conceptualise and theorise brand aura. Design/methodology/approach This article extends understanding of brand aura within the management, marketing and tourism literature with reference to Benjamin's framing of aura and authenticity in time and space. Findings Within a Benjaminian framework

Purpose Despite an increasing body of research on value co-creation through social media, service organizations still face difficulties in leveraging the potential of social media communication to facilitate value co-creation with multiple stakeholders. This article addresses this challenge by adopting a multistakeholder, communication perspective. Design/methodology/approach This article uses a conceptual

Purpose Consumers play a central role in the creation of transformative value, enhancing the well-being of people and the planet. With this article, the authors synthesize service and communication scholars' views to conceptually discuss opportunities and challenges on how to involve consumers in the ideation, creation and dissemination of transformative value. In doing so, the authors identify avenues

Purpose Collaboration between frontline employees (FLEs) and frontline robots (FLRs) is expected to play a vital role in service delivery in these increasingly disrupted times. Firms are facing the challenge of designing effective FLE-FLR collaborations to enhance customer experience. This paper develops a framework to explore the potential of FLE-FLR collaboration through the lens of interdependence

Purpose The purpose of this article is to offer new insights into crisis communication in service ecosystems. The authors present a framework to conceptually categorize service crises and then analyze key aspects of crisis communication among different stakeholders in a service ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach Building on crisis communication and service ecosystems research, we propose a framework

Purpose A significant management issue for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is the disconnect between services beneficiaries and the funders of those services. Individual donors and fundraisers provide the resources to enable other people (or animals) to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to address this service management challenge through new types of customer service interactions that bring

Purpose Recent marketing research provides conceptual models to investigate the well-being of collectives, but service system well-being (SSW) remains untested empirically. This research conceptualises and develops a measure for SSW at the micro, meso and macro levels. Design/methodology/approach Using a series of studies, a multidimensional SSW scale is developed and validated to ensure its generalisability

Purpose Numerous requests to also take care of people (i.e. societal impact) and planet (i.e. environmental impact) in addition to making profits (i.e. economic impact) urge service firms to rethink their marketing. In this paper, the authors therefore develop an organizing framework that integrates the people–planet–profits – also referred to as the “Triple-P” – concept in the marketing strategy,

Purpose The aim of this paper is to integrate insights from service, branding and communication research to present key principles of a successful transformative value positioning for service brands. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, branding and communication literature. Findings The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, this

Purpose Digital platform users not only consume but also produce communication related to their experiences. Although service research has explored users' motivations to communicate and focused on outcomes such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), it remains largely unexplored how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts and potentially create value for themselves, other users and service

Purpose Building meaningful relationships between consumers and service brands has received significant attention. This paper aims to explore how brand love in services – a relationship between the consumer and the service brand – is created through relationships between the consumer and other people. Specifically, we explore how brand love is created through the social relationships consumers form

Purpose This paper examines what the use of an augmented reality (AR) makeup mirror means to consumers, focusing on experiential consumption and the extended self. Design/methodology/approach The authors employed a multimethod approach involving netnography and semi-structured interviews with participants in India and the UK (n = 30). Findings Two main themes emerged from the data: (1) the importance

Purpose The purpose of this study is to question the prospective relevance of conceptual articles on branding. Design/methodology/approach The paper advocates the development of conceptual articles with prospective relevance by emphasizing two key elements – the form and the context of discovery. The paper is illustrated with empirical data on how some branding researchers have produced such conceptual

Purpose As immersive technologies gain wider adoption, contemporary service researchers are tasked with studying their service experiences in ways that preserve and attend to their holistic and human characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to provide service researchers with a new qualitative approach to studying immersive technologies. Design/methodology/approach Using logic and following established

Purpose The paper focuses on extended reality technologies and their potential contribution to the improvement of services. First, it identifies extended reality technologies (AR/VR) as the most promising interfaces to enable an experiential consumption of the services. It then summarises their properties and discusses similarities and differences. Last, it maps these technologies onto a consumer psychology

Purpose Customers' participation in co-creation is a prerequisite for co-creation success. To identify customer co-creators, research has shown a recent interest in the role of personality traits as predictors of customers' engagement in co-creation. However, the empirical results regarding the direction and significance of these relationships have been inconclusive. This study builds on the five-factor

Purpose Wicked problems require holistic and systemic thinking that accommodates interdisciplinary solutions and cross-sectoral collaborations between private and public sectors. This paper explores how public relations (PR) – as a boundary-spanning function at the nexus of corporate and political discourse – can support societies to tackle wicked problems. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic

Purpose Corporate brands increasingly use influential, high reach human brands (e.g. influencers, celebrities), who have strong parasocial relationships with their followers and audiences, to promote their offerings. However, despite emerging understanding of the benefits arising from human brand-based campaigns, knowledge about their potentially negative effects on the corporate brand remains limited

Purpose Customer interactions are integral to service brands. Indeed, many product brands have added services in order to create more opportunity for customer interaction. This paper deals with the strategic use of customer interactions to build a strong brand. Customer interaction strategy has evolved considerably beyond traditional sales and advertising in how customer interactions are conducted

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review what one knows – and does not know about servicescape and experiencescape. The paper provides a comprehensive conceptualization, discussion of the servicescape and experiencescape and calls for the need for a collective focus of servicescape and experiencescape for the service industry. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper analyzes multiple

Purpose Service robots are now an integral part of people's living and working environment, making service robots one of the hot topics for service researchers today. Against that background, the paper reviews the recent service robot literature following a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology (TCCM) approach to capture the state of art of the field. In addition, building on qualitative input

Purpose Service providers increasingly use conversational agents (CAs), such as chatbots, to effectively communicate with customers while managing interaction costs and providing round-the-clock customer service. Yet, the adoption and implementation of such agents in service contexts remains a hit-and-miss, and firms often struggle to balance their CAs implementation complexities and costs with relation

Purpose This article aims to provide an understanding of how utilitarian services can make the customer experience more hedonic. Design/methodology/approach The author performs an in-depth case study of a leading wealth management firm that is reinventing its business model to incorporate a hedonic perspective into experience design. Findings The findings reveal how a traditionally utilitarian firm

Purpose Although consumers feel that the move toward service robots in the frontline so far was driven by firms' strive to replace human service agents and realize cost savings accordingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has led customers to appreciate frontline robots' ability to provide services in ways that keep them safe and protected from the virus. Still, research on this topic is scant. This article

Purpose Uncertain times [e.g. coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] require service businesses to respond in creative, flexible and resilient ways. This paper aims to develop and test the theoretical relationship between digital transformation and organizational resilience (OR), and the consequences of OR on organizations and employees during turbulent times. Design/methodology/approach A scale development

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to note that customers are not necessarily human and to figure out how best to serve artificial intelligence (AI) customers. The authors also propose several major research streams, as examples, to help launch research on AI customers and how to serve them. Design/methodology/approach The current paper is a conceptual one that draws upon research from many areas

Purpose This vision article alerts service managers to the potential of cognitive computing to reframe their value propositions. Humans are bounded in three ways: perception, rationality and physicality. Cognitive computing, hardware or software that transcends these three limits, offers many opportunities to improve the performance of service systems, in particular those focused on customer engagement

Purpose An increasing number of retailers is trying to stimulate customers by embedding augmented reality (AR) features such as video try-on into the online shopping experience. As such AR-based online services require customers to actively participate in the service provision, this paper aims at investigating fairness perceptions and customer responses associated with AR-enabled customer participation

Purpose The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms in product companies opens up new data-driven business opportunities. This paper looks at the emergence of these IoT platforms from a business-model perspective. Design/methodology/approach The study applies a mixed method with two research studies: Study I–a cluster analysis based on a quantitative survey, and Study II–case studies based

Purpose Existing innovation frameworks suggest that manufacturing firms have traditionally developed a complementary model of technological innovations comprising process and product innovations (e.g. Oslo Manual). This article presents digital service innovation as a novel form of technological innovation that is capable of enhancing the performance of firms in certain manufacturing industries. D