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Customer journeys have become an increasingly important topic in service management and design. The purpose of this paper is to review customer journey terminology and approaches within the research literature prior to 2013, mainly from the fields of design, management, and marketing.

The study was conducted as a systematic literature review. Searches in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, ACM Digital Library, and ScienceDirect identified 45 papers for the analysis. The papers were analyzed with respect to customer journey terminology and approaches, the relation to customer experience, the referenced background, and the use of visualizations.

Across the reviewed literature, customer journeys are described not only as a means to take the viewpoint of the customer, but also to reach insight into their experiences. A rich and at times incoherent customer journey terminology is analyzed and discussed, as are two emerging customer journey approaches: customer journey mapping (analysis of a service process “as is”) and customer journey proposition (generative activities leading toward a possible service “to be”).

The review is limited to analyzing and making claims on research papers that explicitly apply the term customer journey. In most of the reviewed papers, customer journeys are not the main object of interest but are discussed as one of several topics.

A nuanced discussion of customer journey terminology and approaches is provided, supporting the practical application of a customer journey perspective.

The review contributes a needed common basis for future customer journey research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework based on customer journeys for a structured portrayal of service delivery from the customer’s point of view. The paper also introduces customer journey analysis (CJA) for empirical investigation of individual service experiences in a multichannel environment.

The paper presents case studies for onboarding new customers on broadband services. CJA starts with modeling of the service process in terms of touchpoints. The individual customer journeys are reconstructed through methodological triangulation of interviews, diary studies, and process tracking.

The paper provides empirical insights into individual customer journeys. Four types of deviations during service delivery are identified: occurrence of ad hoc touchpoints, irregularities in the sequence of logically connected touchpoints, occurrence of failures in touchpoints, and missing touchpoints. CJA seems effective in revealing problematic and incoherent service delivery that may result in unfavorable customer experiences.

For a service company, the proposed framework may serve as a unifying language to ease cross-departmental communication and approach service quality in a systematic way. CJA discloses the gap between the planned and actual service delivery and can be used as a tool for service improvement.

The framework provides concepts, definitions, and a visual notation to structure and manage services in terms of customer journeys. CJA is a novel method for empirical studies of the service delivery process and the associated customer experience.

Hope is regarded central to recovery in a broad range of health conditions including mental health and substance use problems. Still the phenomenon, along with its implications to research and practice, has gained limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore first-person accounts of how practitioners nurture and inspire hope.

This qualitative study is part of a larger action research project. Data were collected using in-depth interviews with eight participants. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed applying thematic analysis.

Hope was perceived as a central phenomenon to practitioners within mental health and substance use services. The following overarching themes were identified through thematic analysis: “Believing in oneself and others,” “Seeing and acknowledging opportunities” and “maneuvering towards hope.”

It seems that there is a need for extending knowledge in how practitioners may inspire hope. In addition there seems to be a need for developing more knowledge on how practitioners’ own hope may be nurtured within a system that is constantly undergoing change and new demands.

Participants considered their own hope as a prerequisite in being able to hope on behalf of others and strategies for inspiring hope were presented on both an individual and system level. Working conditions and challenges within the service system in itself entailed challenges, which at times made nurturing hope difficult. Systems need to embrace flexibility and openness, allowing efforts aimed at inspiring hope to be made. In addition, practitioner’s own hope and the importance of nurturing it, needs to be acknowledged within services. Hope needs to be viewed as a joint venture, in context and in relation to others.

The paper contributes to the knowledge base on hope inspiring practices within a field sometimes associated with challenges and despair. It points out some important preconditions in relation to the challenges practitioners might encounter, both on an individual level and in relation to the service system per se.

This paper concerns public sub-sector branding within the higher education (HE) system. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how public sub-sector branding within HE is organized and how it is influenced by the use of national values, traits and characteristics.

The study relies on two data sources: first, the paper benefits from a data set of one-stop web-portals for HE from the 23 countries listed in Times Higher Education’s top-60 universities ranking. Second, it builds on a sample and brief overview of Norway’s sub-sector branding of its HE sector.

Expert authorities within the HE sector are legally and organizationally responsible for sub-sector branding, and they establish coordinated and coherent web-portals. In practice, however, nation-branding concerns are influencing on how the HE sub-sector is branded. The paper concludes with a discussion of democratic implications, and points to paradoxes arising from the use of national clichés and characteristics in this highly international sub-sector of the public realm.

The paper informs discussions about public sub-sector branding within HE, a phenomenon that thus far has not been systematically studied. The practical applications of such a study are evident, as branding is becoming more important in the public sector in general, and in HE in particular.

This paper aims to explore how gender is “done” on farms in Sweden in the context of increased tourism and hospitality activities. The authors seek to investigate how gender is done vis-à-vis women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship. They seek to answer the questions: What has motivated the farm women to become tourism entrepreneurs? How are the gendered divisions of labor changed through women starting businesses? How does the gendered associated symbolism, as well as the identities, change?

Research has indicated that introducing tourism entrepreneurship at farms may challenge established gender relations, as many of these entrepreneurs are women. The empirical material consists of in-depth interviews with 15 women farm tourism entrepreneurs in central Sweden.

The analysis suggests that the gendered divisions of labor are not changed through the interviewed women starting tourism businesses. The authors conclude that the women build their entrepreneurship and develop some of their products on an image of rural domesticity, including a representation of themselves as traditional farm women. At the same time they are changing how gender is done through identifying as entrepreneurs and changing the use of the farms.

The authors seek to fill the research gap concerning women’s farm tourism entrepreneurship and the potential associated gendered changes. Their theoretical contribution is applying the perspective of “doing gender” and entrepreneurship, for delineating potential changes in gendered relations.

The purpose of this paper is to present results from an exploratory study of private investigations by fraud examiners in Norway. The activity of private investigations by fraud examiners is a business of lawyers, auditors and other professionals who investigate suspicions of financial crime by white-collar criminals.

This article presents results from an empirical study of investigation reports.

The available sample consists of 21 reports produced mostly by auditing firms such as PwC. Suspicion of financial crime led to police investigation, public prosecution and jail sentence in two cases.

Empirical studies of private investigations are rare.