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In the contemporary hospitality industry, superior customer experiences are essential in gaining customer loyalty and achieving a competitive advantage. However, limited research addresses this subject. The purpose of this study is to advance scholarly research on customer experience management (CEM) in the hospitality field by providing a comprehensive overview of the key elements of CEM, a framework for managing customer experience and a rich agenda for research.

An extensive literature review produces a comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge of CEM. A synthesis of previous literature reveals the need for additional, contemporary information sources. The study is, therefore, supplemented by invited commentaries on CEM from senior scholars and hospitality managers.

The proposed model takes a holistic perspective on managing a positive customer experience, through collaboration among marketing, operations, design, human resources and strategy, in association with technology and social media.

The literature review and commentaries from leading experts reveal six areas for further research on CEM in the hospitality industry.

This study provides a comprehensive, systematic review of CEM literature and detailed understanding of the mechanisms for managing customer experiences in the hospitality industry. It integrates state-of-the-art CEM knowledge in the generic business context, along with principles of hospitality management, and advances CEM research by emphasizing the need for collaboration among marketing, operations and human resources.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of context in service innovation by developing a conceptual framework that illuminates the key elements and trends in context change.

The paper adopts a service ecosystem lens for understanding how elements and trends in context foster service innovation. A conceptual framework identifying the role of context change in fostering service innovation is developed and justified through illustrations across industry settings of health, retailing, banking and education.

Context change is conceptualized by three trends – speed, granularity and liquification – that provide an analytical foundation for understanding how changes in the elements of context – space, resources and institutional arrangements – can foster service innovation. The analysis indicates emerging patterns across industries that allow exploring scenarios, grounded in emerging trends and developments in service innovation toward 2050.

Managers are offered a framework to guide service innovation and help them prepare for the future. The paper also suggests areas for further research.

The paper contributes with a new conceptualization of context change to identify and explain service innovation opportunities. Managers are offered a framework to guide service innovation and help them prepare for 2050. The paper also suggests areas for further service innovation research, zooming in on contextual changes to prepare for 2050.

The collective, interactive aspects of service experience are increasingly evident in contemporary research and practice, but no integrative analysis of this phenomenon has been conducted until now. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize service experience co-creation and examines its implications for research and practice.

To map the multi-approach research area of service experience co-creation, the study draws on literature in the fields of service management, service-dominant logic and service logic, consumer culture theory, and service innovation and design, together with invited commentaries by prominent scholars.

A conceptualization is developed for “service experience co-creation,” and multiple dimensions of the concept are identified. It is postulated that service experience co-creation has wider marketing implications, in terms of understanding experiential value creation and foundational sociality in contemporary markets, as well as in the renewal of marketing methods and measures.

The authors call for cross-field research on service experience, extending current contextual and methodological reach. Researchers are urged to study the implications of increasing social interaction for service experience co-creation, and to assist managers in coping with and leveraging the phenomenon.

For practitioners, this analysis demonstrates the complexity of service experience co-creation and provides insights on the aspects they should monitor and facilitate.

As the first integrative analysis and conceptualization of service experience co-creation, this paper advances current understanding on the topic, argues for its wider relevance, and paves the way for its future development.

The purpose of this paper is to provide directions for future research on: broadening the role of customers in customer experience; taking a practice-based approach to customer experience; and recognizing the holistic, dynamic nature of customer experience across all touch points and over time.

The approach is conceptual identifying current gaps in research on customer experience.

The findings include a set of research questions and research agenda for future research on customer experience.

This research suggests fresh perspectives for understanding the customer experience which can inspire future research and advance theory and managerial practice.

Increased competition and more extensive customer needs have motivated companies to develop integrated solutions. In practice, companies struggle to co‐create effective solutions that meet customer needs. The purpose of this paper is to identify critical factors affecting the effective co‐creation of customer‐focused solutions within business networks.

The study investigates the co‐creation of two different types of solution. Data were collected from two business networks comprising 13 companies, including suppliers and their customers. The empirical data comprise 51 interviews and observations made at 21 company workshops.

Effective co‐creation of solutions requires a fit between the perceptions of multiple suppliers and their customers with regard to core content, operations and processes, customer experience and value of the solution. Co‐creation is affected by, e.g. customer's preferences for participation and value, and the degree of competition, clarity of role division and rapport among the suppliers.

Further empirical research is needed to examine how companies could overcome the problems identified, and reap the opportunities arising from the factors affecting the co‐creation of solutions.

The paper presents a framework that outlines practical activities that help firms to reconcile the perspectives of different actors, and to facilitate the integration of resources when co‐creating solutions within business networks.

The paper contributes to the solutions literature by studying solutions as a network‐level process of resource integration between multiple suppliers and their mutual customers, and by applying a service concept framework to the study of integrated solutions.

Customer participation in the creation of offerings has become a key focus in marketing literature. This paper synthesizes extant research on the topic to enhance understanding of the conceptualization and value outcomes of customer participation in the creation of offerings.

The study is based on an extensive, systematic literature review covering 163 articles on customer participation published over the last four decades. Selected publications were analyzed according to the topics studied, study context, research approach, and findings.

The review demonstrates how the conceptualization of customer participation has evolved in terms of the nature and range of customer contributions, their temporal scope, and the outcomes considered. It also synthesizes the hypothesized and empirically scrutinized value outcomes of customer participation for both sellers and customers.

The review reveals important gaps in the existing knowledge on customer participation, and identifies relevant areas for future research. The literature review may have missed some relevant papers that use different terminologies.

Managers should consider the strategic significance of customer participation in their businesses, promote the potential benefits to their customers, and institute necessary changes in their organization to facilitate participation.

This paper provides a structured overview of the empirical and conceptual research addressing customer participation and brings forth evidences regarding its value outcomes, thereby contributing to extant knowledge on value creation.

To test the validity of the presumed characteristics of professional services by studying their manifestation in the problem solving that occurs in service production.

The paper uses medical research as secondary data to study the existence of associations between the presumed characteristics of professional services and problem solving in the medical context. A systematic review of empirical studies concerning physicians' prescribing decisions is conducted.

Supporting assumptions presented in the literature, specialist knowledge of professional and customer participation was found to influence prescribing decisions. The assumption regarding collegial control was partially supported. Some degree of contradiction was found with respect to the presumed professional autonomy and altruism. Whilst the professional services literature emphasises factors related to the client's problem, the service encounter and the profession, we conclude that problem solving is influenced also by factors embedded in the related organisational, market and institutional environments.

Further empirical validation of the presumed professional characteristics is needed. The results indicate that professional services research should pay more attention to the role of the wider context in professional problem solving. Medical researchers might also benefit from a broader perspective on patient participation.

An holistic view of factors that influence physicians' prescribing decisions is of use to managers of health care organisations, marketers of pharmaceuticals, and policy makers and third‐party payers.

By using an interdisciplinary approach, the paper contributes to professional services research by providing empirical support for the often repeated characteristics of professional services and outlining factors that potentially influence problem solving within professional services.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how service, as an interdisciplinary area of research, can increase its potential for transdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of what signifies intra-, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research.

The essay first discusses common perspectives on the service concept before presenting a review on what signifies intra-, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research. The emerging theoretical framework is followed by a discussion on the challenges and opportunities for service research in making interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theoretical contributions.

The research provides a typological framework for understanding intra-, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary service research and, implications related to how service research contributions can become increasingly inter- and transdisciplinary.

The paper contributes to widening the scope of service research by focussing on how the domain can overcome hurdles and increase its potential for making theoretical contributions that are applicable across and beyond established research disciplines.

Management of customer participation (CP) in service production and delivery is of critical concern for service managers, as CP can result in various positive but also negative outcomes. However, an integrated understanding on how service providers can manage CP is still missing. The purpose of this paper is to gather and synthesize the extant knowledge on the constituents of CP management into a comprehensive framework, and to offer an extensive agenda for future research.

A systematic literature review of existing research is conducted. A total of 181 journal articles are analyzed in five steps: attaining basic understanding, coding, categorization, comparison, and further analysis.

The authors provide identification and categorizations of the customer inputs, their antecedents, the management approaches, and the outcomes of CP. To date, CP management has been addressed from three distinct perspectives: human resource management that treats customers as partial employees; operations management that focusses on customer functioning during the service process; and marketing that highlights the roles and value outcomes for customers.

The authors call for further research that addresses the relationships between the antecedents, customer inputs, management approaches, and outcomes of CP, and argue for extension of contextual diversity. The detailed research agenda provided is helpful for interested researchers.

The study offers managerial insights on how the degree and quality of CP can be improved by applying the various management methods examined in academic research.

As the first comprehensive review on this topic, this paper brings together the dispersed knowledge on CP, integrates it into a comprehensive framework of CP management, and paves the way for future focussed research.