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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 viewpoint.

This research follows a systematic literature review process, providing an in-depth analysis of 135 articles (covering 184 studies) to distill the (1) key building blocks and components of personalization and (2) theoretical, contextual, and methodological aspects of the studies.

This manuscript uncovers six personalization components that can be linked to two personalization building blocks: (1) learning: manner, transparency, and timing and (2) tailoring: touchpoints, level, and dynamics. For each of these components, the authors propose future research avenues to stimulate personalization research that accounts for challenges in today's data-rich environments (e.g. data privacy, dealing with new data types). A theoretical, contextual, and methodological (i.e. industry, country and personalization object) review of the selected studies leads to a set of concrete recommendations for future work: account for heterogeneity, embed theoretical perspectives, infuse methodological innovation, adopt appropriate evaluation metrics, and deal with legal/ethical challenges in data-rich environments. Finally, several managerial implications are put forth to support practitioners in their personalization efforts.

This research provides an integration of personalization research beyond existing and outdated review papers. Doing so, it accounts for the impact of new technologies and Artificial Intelligence and aims to advance the next generation of knowledge development on personalization.

Managers seeking to manage customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior need to understand how different attitudinal drivers (e.g. satisfaction, positive and negative emotion, commitment, and self-brand connection) relate to a range of WOM behaviors. They also need to know how the effects of these drivers are moderated by customer characteristics (e.g. gender, age, income, country). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To investigate these issues a built a large-scale multi-national database was created that includes attitudinal drivers, customer characteristics, and a full range of WOM behaviors, involving both the sending and receiving of both positive and negative WOM, with both strong and weak ties. The combination of sending-receiving, positive-negative and strong ties-weak ties results in a typology of eight distinct WOM behaviors. The investigation explores the drivers of those behaviors, and their moderators, using a hierarchical Bayes model in which all WOM behaviors are simultaneously modeled.

Among the many important findings uncovered are: the most effective way to drive all positive WOM behaviors is through maximizing affective commitment and positive emotions; minimizing negative emotions and ensuring that customers are satisfied lowers all negative WOM behaviors; all other attitudinal drivers have lower or even mixed effects on the different WOM behaviors; and customer characteristics can have a surprisingly large impact on how attitudes affect different WOM behaviors.

These findings have important managerial implications for promotion (which attitudes should be stimulated to produce the desired WOM behavior) and segmentation (how should marketing efforts change, based on segments defined by customer characteristics).

This research points to the myriad of factors that enhance positive and reduce negative word-of-mouth, and the importance of accounting for customer heterogeneity in assessing the likely impact of attitudinal drivers on word-of-mouth behaviors.

Focal service providers increasingly involve customers in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties. The present study investigates how customers' outsourcing decisions affect the formation of the waiting experience with the focal service provider, by which the objective waiting time, environmental quality and interactional quality act as focal drivers.

To test our hypotheses in the context of cancer care, we gathered process data and experience data by means of a patient observation template (n = 640) and a patient survey (n = 487). The combined data (n = 377) were analyzed using Bayesian models.

This study shows that opting for a service triad (i.e. outsourcing non-core services to a third party) deduces customers' attention away from the objective waiting time with the focal service provider but not from the environmental and interactional quality offered by the focal service provider. When the type of service triad coordination is considered, we observe similar effects for a focal service provider-coordinated service triad while in a customer-coordinated service triad the interactional quality is the sole experience driver of waiting experiences that remains significant.

By investigating the implications of customer participation in the decision-making about outsourcing parts of the service delivery process to third parties, this research contributes to the service design, service triad and service operations literature. Specifically, this study shows that customer outsourcing decisions impact waiting experience formation with the focal service provider.

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, implementation and evaluation of service firms.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service marketing, marketing strategy and communication literature.

The foundations of marketing strategy (Palmatier and Crecelius, 2019) and the Gaps model of service marketing (Parasuraman et al., 1985) guide both academics and practitioners regarding (1) why the Triple-P idea should be part of a company's marketing strategy, (2) how people and planet could play an important role in the implementation stage by integrating the Triple-P concept in the service marketing mix and (3) what impact could be achieved and evaluated by closing the five gaps identified by the Gaps model, while fostering a people–planet–profits mindset.

The authors also identify areas for future research on this important topic.

Transformative value (people and planet) without profits is not attractive to firms. Profit-making organizations are in the best position to transform the world in a societal and environmental rewarding way.

The Triple-P affects the marketing strategy, implementation and evaluation of firms and contributes to a better, sustainable world.

Marketing evolves from traditional over service and digital to transformative. Therefore, it is crucial to embrace transformative challenges in combination with economic returns, resulting in a new sustainable service era for marketers and managers.

This study aims to investigate the impact of technical (i.e. what is delivered) and functional (i.e. how is it delivered) service quality on consumer happiness in a multichannel environment. In so doing, this study responds to increasing calls from academics (e.g. transformative service research movement) and practitioners to move beyond pure financial measures when deciding how to manage businesses.

With a sample of 809 customers of a medium-sized Belgian mail order firm, within-class regression models tested for the moderating role of channel usage.

Both technical and functional service quality have positive impacts on consumer happiness. However, depending on the channel(s) used, the quality dimension that has the greatest impact on consumer happiness differs.

The findings offer managers insights on how they can create and cultivate consumer happiness by delivering excellent service quality. This study stresses the importance of looking beyond purely financial measures to manage firms, and as such deliver value to consumers, the firm itself and society at large.

This study advances transformative service research by being one of the few empirical studies relating service quality to consumer happiness in today's multichannel environment.

Many companies focus considerable resources on managing and enhancing positive word of mouth (WOM). WOM management, however, has become increasingly complex given the rise of online channels and the corresponding increasing breadth of connections giving and receiving WOM. Given the generally believed importance of WOM to business outcomes, managers seek to leverage key drivers that they believe will enhance positive and minimize negative WOM.

Implicit in these actions is the belief that leveraging key drivers to enhance positive (or minimize negative) WOM results in generally positive outcomes across channels and connections. This research investigates whether this belief is correct. We examined WOM behaviors from over 15,000 consumers from 10 different countries in eight industry categories, as well as consumer attitudes toward the various brands investigated. Our findings indicate that efforts to enhance positive WOM typically have mixed effects – enhancing positive WOM in some channels while decreasing it (or even enhancing negative WOM) in other channels. Therefore, managers need to have a greater understanding of the complexity of leveraging attitudinal key drivers when seeking to enhance WOM to minimize potential negative outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative novel approach to measurement of customer perceptions of the service experience that links closely with customer loyalty outcomes.

This conceptual paper draws upon prior theory and empirical research to investigate the relevance of using relative metrics compared to absolute metrics in service research.

The findings upon which this paper draws upon show that measuring customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, brand preference using absolute metrics explain a very small per cent of the variance in key customer outcome measures such as share of wallet. Instead, a relative approach to these and other measures in service research is proposed.

Although business practice has embraced relative measurement much more extensively than has scientific research, the vast majority of customer experience measurement programs today continue to employ absolute measures resulting in suboptimal allocation of firm resources. This paper is a call to rethink these current measurement practices.

It is one of the first papers to argue for changing the widely employed use of absolute metrics in theory and practice in favor of relative metrics. Application to other service research theories is discussed.

This research aims to investigate the moderating influence of both multichannel and multicompany usage on the impact that customer satisfaction has on share of wallet (SOW).

The data used in the analyses were collected as part of both survey and transactional data of 802 households of a large financial services provider. Within class regression models were employed to test the moderating effects of different segments that were identified based on multichannel‐multicompany customer differences.

The findings confirm that using multiple channels has an overall positive moderating impact on the satisfaction‐SOW link and that customer satisfaction matters more when the customer adopts multiple channels; online channel usage in addition to offline usage. Furthermore, this effect is even more pronounced for customers that transact with multiple providers. That is, the group of customers that use both the company's and competitors' offline and online channels reveal a higher satisfaction‐SOW association than the group of customers that only adopted the offline channel with the company and competitor.

This study broadens the understanding of multichannel behavior by comparing single (offline) and multiple channels (offline and online) for customers of multiple companies (two competitors).

Previous research considers service recovery as a one-on-one interaction between a service provider and a complaining customer. However, customers frequently complain at the place where they receive the service, making an investigation of the impact of a service recovery on observing customers necessary. Using observational learning theory and attribution theory as theoretical anchors, this paper examines whether observing a service recovery influences the observing customers’ satisfaction and repurchase intentions. In addition, this paper tests whether service quality perceptions mediate, and customers’ locus of control attributions moderate these relationships.

Study 1 tests the main hypothesis using a scenario-based experiment in two settings (restaurant, retail). Study 2 further elaborates on these findings using a scenario-based experiment in a hotel setting.

The findings show that the negative consequences of a failed recovery extend beyond the complaining customers to observing customers, whereas the positive consequences of observing a satisfactory recovery do not influence the observing customer when compared to observing a failure-free service delivery. These relationships are driven by the service quality information customers extract from observing a service recovery. In addition, the results indicate that the negative spill-over effects are attenuated if the observing customer gets information about who caused the failure.

From a theoretical point of view, this study contributes by outlining service recovery's different impacts on complaining and observing customers: whereas service recovery forms a critical for complaining customers, it only acts as a dissatisfier for observing customers. In addition, it is the first to test a potential explanation for why observing a service recovery leads to lower customer outcomes, and provides insights about how service providers might attenuate the negative spill-over effects of a failed recovery.