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The research question focused on in this study is whether complaint and compliment contain different service quality attributes. A sample of 236 complaints and 69 compliments collected by a public transport company were analyzed by means of the critical incident technique. The results of previous research were confirmed and showed that perceived service quality attributes in public transport involve employee behavior, reliability, simplicity and design. It was further concluded that reliability of service causes frequently more complaints than compliments. How customers are treated by the employees was found to be more frequent in compliments.

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.

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.

This study aims at deepening understanding of the role of emotion in customer switching processes and identifying the relative frequency of negative discrete emotions in terms of different triggers.

Customers of Swedish telecommunications services were interviewed about their switching processes. The interviews were analyzed according to switching path analysis technique, which divides relationships into different stages in accordance with their relevance to the relationship strength. The ultimate focus is on self‐reported emotions embedded in the switching process.

The main finding was that the identified emotions were located in the trigger part of the relationship, and was expressed by the respondents during the switching process in form of annoyance, anxiety, disappointment, dissatisfaction, distress, depression, rage, stress and tension.

The empirical study is conducted within the telecom industry which may influence the switching frequency because of the deregulations in the beginning of this decade. This interpretation of valence and activation was based on theoretical assumptions about where various discrete emotions are located on a continuum.

The paper offers insight into the role of emotion in customer relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not emotions experienced in customer relationships – linked to actual behavior – could enhance understanding of their future development.

A number of individual‐level relationships between customers and telecom operators are investigated. The empirical data consist of 113 switching stories reported during 81 interviews with telecom customers.

In the analysis, emotional experiences are related to customers' activity or passivity and to the stability (switching or not) in the relationships. The most important research contribution is the identification of different emotions related to actual behavior. Less stable customers are pessimistic about the operators and show nervousness, while stable customers may have initially been depressed in their relationships, becoming more relaxed and optimistic over time. Emotions do not seem to have the capacity in themselves to cause stability or instability, but they confirm through their connection to different types of trigger whether the relationship will be stable or unstable.

The findings of the present study are based on a longitudinal empirical study, but only in one industry. Although, the telecom industry may provide a very fruitful context for the longitudinal study of stability in customer relationships because of the turbulence it has experienced during the last decade, the industry representation is narrow.

Customers do not sever their emotional ties with the previous relationship when they enter the new one. On the contrary, they linger in the switched‐from relationship at least at first, which is indicated in the various emotional expressions they use. The present study takes some initial steps towards enhancing understanding of the dynamism in providing an insight into customers' differing emotional reactions connected to triggers during one and the same relationship.

Taking a longitudinal approach from the customers' perspective produces a set boundaries of customer relationships that may not coincide with the set boundaries seen from the service providers' perspective. According to the findings of the present study, it seems almost impossible to understand customer relationships without following customers on an individual level in both previous and current relationships. Despite the fact that dynamism in customer relationships is widely discussed in previous research, few studies have applied such a perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore enhancing theory development in service research and provide an overview of the five essays on theorizing initiated by the International Network for Service Research workshop, held at Karlstad, Sweden in September 2014.

A collaborative theorizing process which was initiated at the Karlstad, Sweden workshop.

Six (five from the event and the introduction) original and provocative essays that explore different aspects of theorizing in service research.

Exploring how a collaborative approach to research can be used.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reflective account of the emergence of new marketing theory as seen through the lens of the Nordic School of Service.

The paper is based on documents and the authors' self‐lived history and current involvement (“management action research”).

Northern European scholars, especially from Finland and Sweden, have felt free to design their own theory, at the same time collaborating internationally. Contributions include an early alert to services and business‐to‐business (B2B) marketing being neglected; dissatisfaction with service quality; that the service economy is more than the service sector; and the insight that relationship marketing and many‐to‐many network marketing better represent service reality. A novel service logic abandoning the divisive goods/services, B2B/B2C (business‐to‐consumer), and supplier/customer categories, based on commonalities and interdependencies is arriving. Nordic School methodology is characterised by induction, case study research, and theory generation, to better address complexity and ambiguity in favour of validity and relevance. In the 2000s, the synthesis provided by service‐dominant (S‐D) logic, IBM's service science, and network and systems theory have inspired a lively international dialogue.

The hegemony of the marketing management of mass‐manufactured consumer goods was challenged when services entered the marketing agenda in the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s the differences been goods marketing and service marketing were explored and the understanding for relationships, networks and interaction developed. It gradually laid the ground for the integrated goods/services approach that is now the major challenge for service researchers and practitioners alike.

It is unfortunate if developments of marketing in the USA are perceived as a universal standard for marketing. By studying contributions from many cultures and nations in other countries the paper enhances the understanding of the diversity of marketing. This article presents such a case from Northern Europe.