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Despite the significance of online communication and interactions, previous research has not systematically compared all features on a single platform from the users' perspective. This study aims to fill this gap by extensively reviewing the current literature on social media affordances and proposes and tests a feature-centric and affordance-based conceptualization of social media platforms (SMPs) between users, features, the audience and content.

This research surveys users on Facebook, one of the largest SMPs, and asks them to assess 20 features of Facebook on six relational affordances between users, features, audience and content. The data in this study were collected on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with participants from the US Correspondence analysis was employed to examine the relationship between affordances and the ties among affordances, features and outcomes.

Results of the study indicate that users perceive features differently, and employing features as the unit of analysis captures users' interactions effectively. The findings support the presence of user-oriented affordances, such as presentation flexibility, association and content association. These three affordances can be summarized in two higher-level ones: self-expression and connection (SEC) and persona-linked content (PLC). Our findings of the two dimensions, SEC and PLC, highlight the importance of targets and their connections in understanding social media interactions' dynamic nature.

By proposing to shift the focus from platforms to features, this study suggests that companies should focus on understanding the features they use for their users to interact with their brand, rather than merely ensuring that their company is omnipresent on all platforms. This study underlines the need to focus on features that will help managers influence interpersonal and user-brand communications and interactions on social media.

This research is the first to put features at the center of its investigation and quantitatively examine the relationship between social media features and affordances in a social media context. In all, this research provides a new unit of analysis that is more suitable for researchers to build a robust conceptual foundation for affordances. We believe that conceptualizing audience and content as outcomes, distinguishing it from features and creating connections between them as affordances is the unique aspect of our conceptualization.

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether consumers can recover from a service failure by utilizing internal and external energy resources that are available to them at the time of an online complaint. Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this research conceptualizes the complainers' act of complaining through internal and external energy resources. By investing (direct utilization of resources) and mobilizing (utilizing resources to change the trajectory of a loss) these resources, this study aims to understand which resources (internal or external) and what strategies (investment or mobilization) are effective in the face of a resource loss.

Study 1 aimed to test the impact of energy resources (motivation and affordance) on consumers' negative emotions and satisfaction with their complaints through an online panel survey. Study 2 was a between-subjects design experiment aimed to overcome the diversity of the circumstances around a service failure, complaint motivation and complaints that were captured in Study 1.

This study provides evidence of the negative and positive effects of internal and external energy resources, respectively, in altering the consumer's emotions and behavioral intentions. The findings of this study underline the role of affordances of features, specifically perceived conversationality of digital features, in improving consumers' relationship with the defaulting firm.

Based on the findings related to the perceived conversationality of digital features, managers are urged to explore the affordances of online features that consumers use for communications, in general, or for complaints, in particular.

To our understanding, this paper is the first study to employ COR theory as a conceptual background, and in turn, the first to conceptualize complaint motivations and online complaint features as internal and external resources, respectively. As such, this study is the first of its kind to examine complaint media systematically.

Scholars have proposed that the negative effects of service failures can be countered by developing and maintaining high quality customer-company relationships or by providing excellent service recovery to customers. While both strategies have been proposed as ways to overcome the negative effects of service failures, there are only a limited number of studies that have examined their joint effects. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by investigating the impact of these two strategies jointly on rumination (brooding and reflection), anger and customer forgiveness (revenge, avoidance and benevolence).

The experimental design used in this study is an adaptation of Mattila’s (2001) research design, which manipulated both the level of service recovery and relationship. A total of 677 respondents were assigned randomly to one of the six experimental conditions. Multi-group structural equation modeling was employed to estimate the proposed model across three relational conditions.

This study suggests that the buffering effects are directly triggered by the impact of relationships, whereas, the magnifying effects are primarily related to the customer’s cognitive processes. This study reveals multiple forms of concurrent buffering and magnifying effects in service failures.

The findings of the study led to a classification system of the various forms of buffering and magnifying effects of relationships in the event of service failures. The four active roles of relationships are identified as damage control, benefit catalyst, benefit attenuator and damage catalyst. This proposed typology breaks new ground for theorizing about relationship utilization in negative incidents.

Institutional arrangements for collaborative purposes have gained increasing attention within research on service ecosystems. For collaborations to be effective, actors need to undertake institutional work that will result in new institutional arrangements. When institutional work takes place across service ecosystems, actors may be confronted with non-harmonious or conflicting institutional arrangements, which need to be reconciled by translating the incompatible views of diverse ecosystems. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of boundary objects as a means of facilitating institutional work across ecosystems, and present their mechanism in undertaking institutional work.

Longitudinal qualitative interviews were conducted with three key actors (funding agency, service provider and clinicians) in providing home-based support services (HBSS). The data were analyzed by undertaking a thematic analysis of the transcripts, which helped to identify the actors’ views on the nature of HBSS and its impact as a boundary object within the implementation of the case-mix system, and thus to empirically illustrate the theoretical assumptions.

The data assisted in the creation of a conceptualization that maps out the process of boundary objects facilitating (disrupting and creating) institutional work. This study supports that boundary objects disrupt boundaries between actors’ ecosystems, which was a sufficient condition to dismantle institutional support for the practices of individual fields. Furthermore, the object has changed the type and extent of interaction between actors in an ecosystem to allow these actors to redefine their identity and role in the new institutional arrangement.

This work has developed a novel conceptualization for a boundary object-led translation process in facilitating institutional work. To the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the processes and mechanisms of boundary objects in facilitating institutional work across ecosystems.

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 in customer service experience and advances research that specifically focuses on employee-robot team development.

This paper uses a conceptual approach rooted in the interdependence theory, team design, management, robotics and automation literature.

This paper proposes and defines the Frontline employee – Frontline robot interdependence (FLERI) concept based on three structural components of an interdependent relationship – joint goal, joint workflow and joint decision-making authority. It also provides propositions that outline the potential impact of FLERI on customer experience and employee performance, and outline several boundary conditions that could enhance or inhibit those effects.

Managerial insights into designing an employee-robot team in service delivery are provided.

This study is the first to propose a novel conceptual framework (FLERI) that focuses on the notion of human-robot collaboration in service settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how customers’ upgrading/downgrading _(t−1) behavior may be predictive of future spending. Further, this paper also investigates how customers’ post-consumption evaluations of upgrades and downgrades [satisfaction_(t−1) and perceived value_(t−1)] may moderate the relationship between upgrades/downgrades and future spending.

The predictions are tested using a large longitudinal data set of river cruise purchases (N = 48,103) and largely replicated using a data set of zoo membership purchases (N = 2,469).

Satisfaction_(t−1) mitigates the positive relationship between prior upgrades_(t−1) and future spending_(t). In contrast, perceived value_(t−1) magnifies the positive relationship between prior upgrades_(t−1) and future spending_(t). However, no positively moderating effects are observed to alleviate the negative relationship between prior downgrades_(t−1) and future spending_(t).

This research suggests that managers should work hard early in customer–firm relationships because of an asymmetric difficultly in altering the trajectory of an established relationship. Specifically, relationships that are trending downward (as consecutive downgrades would suggest) are difficult to repair – a mechanism to alter this trajectory is not observed. In contrast, relationships that are trending upward (as consecutive upgrades would suggest) can be improved with high perceived value evaluations but also degraded with high satisfaction evaluations.

This research should recast marketers’ understanding of the value of customers’ upgrade and downgrade decisions. Instead of using customers’ upgrade or downgrade decisions as the dependent variable, or final outcome in buyer behavior, this study shows how the accumulation of prior upgrades and prior downgrades, over time, acts as a bellwether of the customer–firm relationship. Further, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to connect these upgrade/downgrade decisions to customers’ evaluations of those purchases to understand how individual purchases can impact the overall customer–firm relationship.

While service brands are conceptualised as being both the company’s presented brand and the customer’s relationship experience, most research to date has supported the central role of the latter over the former in creating customer value and developing loyalty. Studies supporting the central role of relationship experience have relied on classification schemes that have been developed around the role of employees. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to propose and test the effect of two new moderators, namely advertising spending- and labour-intensity (LI), in predicting the impact of company image and employee trust.

Four contexts (banking, internet provider, insurance and hairdressing) were selected based on their advertising spending- and LI, and a multi-group structural equation modelling technique was employed to test for differences between contexts.

Company image and employee trust were found to have a significant impact on customer value and loyalty perceptions, with considerable differences in patterns across the chosen contexts. This study has confirmed that differences in advertising spending intensity can explain discrepancies in the relative influence of customer value and loyalty drivers across multiple service industries.

The findings of this study shed new light on the results of previous studies that relied solely on classification schemes and which supported the primary importance of employee-customer interactions for service brands. Ultimately, this research can help managers better understand the driving forces of their business.