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In important interpersonal service interactions with a frontline employee (FLE), consumers at times fail to carry out their share of responsibility in the execution of the service, resulting in a situation of “consumer created emergency”. This might defeat the consumer's goal of availing the service (termed as consumer failure). This study explains the role of employee's hope in managing consumer failure in the situation of consumer created emergencies.

Hypotheses were tested in three experiments that simulated service emergency across a general printing service situation and a travel service situation.

The study shows that: (1) FLE hope has a positive effect on consumer satisfaction, and is mediated by the consumer's assumed effort by the FLE; (2) the effect of FLE hope on consumer satisfaction changes with changing levels of consumer hopefulness about the service outcome; (3) despite situation of consumer created emergency, consumer failure results in low consumer satisfaction due to attribution error and (4) external attribution by the FLE could not significantly rectify consumer's attribution error and hence could not alleviate consumer dissatisfaction.

The study suggests relevance and pathways of managing emotions and attributions of consumers and FLEs for superior performance outcomes.

The study theorizes and tests the role of hope, which is an important positive emotion during emergencies because frontline service settings have heretofore predominantly focused on managing negative traits and outcomes.

This paper aims to complement the current understanding about user engagement in electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) communications across online services and product communities. It examines the effect of the senders’ prior experience with products and services, and their extent of acquaintance with other community members, on user engagement with the eWoM.

The study used a sample of 576 unique user postings from the corporate fan page of two German firms: a service community of a telecom provider and a product community of a car manufacturer. Multiple regression analysis is used to test the conceptual model.

Senders’ prior experience and acquaintance positively affect user engagement with eWoM, and these effects differ across communities for products and services and across their influence on “likes” and “comments”. The results also suggest that communities for products are orientated toward information sharing, while those discussing services engage in information building.

This research explains mechanisms of user engagement with eWoM and opens directions for future research around motives, content and social media tools within the structures of online communities. The insights on information-handling dimensions of online tools and antecedents to their use contribute to the research on two prioritized topics by the Marketing Science Institute – “Measuring and Communicating the Value of Online Marketing Activities and Investments” and “Leveraging Digital/Social/Mobile Technology”.

This research offers insights for firms to leverage user engagement and facilitate eWoM generation through members who have a higher number of acquaintances or who have more experience with the product or service. Executives should concentrate their community engagement strategies on the identification and utilization of power users. The conceptualization and empirical test about the role of likes and comments will help social media managers to create and better capture value from their social media metrics.

The insights about the underlying factors that influence engagement with eWoM advance our understanding about the usage of online content.

This study aims to conceptualize and test the effect of consumers’ perceptions of complaint handling quality (PCHQ) in both traditional and social media channels.

Study 1 systematically reviews the relevant literature and then carries out a consumer and manager survey. This approach aims to conceptualize the dimensionality of PCHQ. Study 2 tests the effect of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes. Using survey data from a German telecommunications company, the study provides an explanation for the differences in outcomes across traditional (hotline) and social media channels.

Study 1 reveals that PCHQ is best conceptualized as a five-dimensional construct with 15 facets. There are significant differences between customers and managers in terms of the importance attached to the various dimensions. The construct shows strong psychometric properties with high reliability and validity, thereby opening up opportunities to treat these facets as measurement indicators for the construct. Study 2 indicates that the effect of PCHQ on consumer loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is stronger in social media than in traditional channels. Procedural justice and the overall quality of service solutions emerge as general dimensions of PCHQ because they are equally important in both channels. In contrast, interactional justice, distributive justice and customer effort have varying effects across the two channels.

This study contributes to the understanding of a firm’s channel selection for complaint handling in two ways. First, it evaluates and conceptualizes the PCHQ construct. Second, it compares the effects of different dimensions of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes across traditional and social media channels.

This study enables managers to understand the difference in efficacy attached to different dimensions of PCHQ. It further highlights such differences across traditional and social media service channels. For example, the effect of complaint handling on social media is of particular importance when generating WOM communication.

This study offers a comprehensive conceptualization of the PCHQ construct and reveals the general and channel contingent effects of its different dimensions on key marketing outcomes.

This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically test the determinants of service interaction quality (SIQ) as attitude, behavior and expertise of a service provider (SP). Further, the individual and simultaneous effects of SIQ and its dimensions on important marketing outcomes are tested.

The narrative review of extant research helps formulate a conceptual model of SIQ, which is investigated using the univariate and multivariate meta-analysis.

There are interdependencies between drivers of SIQ that underlines the need to conceptualize service interaction as a dyadic phenomenon; use contemporary multilevel models, dyadic models, non-linear structural equation modeling and process studies; and study new and diverse services contexts. Meta-analysis illustrates the relative importance of the three drivers of SIQ and, in turn, their impact on consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

The meta-analysis is based on existing research, which, unfortunately, has not examined critical services or exigency situations where SIQ is of paramount importance. Future research will be tasked with diversifying to several important domains where SIQ is a critical aspect of perceived service quality.

This study emphasizes that, although the expertise of an SP is important, firms would be surprised to learn that the attitude and behavior of their employees are equally important antecedents. In fact, there is a delicate balance that needs to be found; otherwise, attitudinal factors can have an overall counterproductive effect on consumer satisfaction.

This paper provides an empirical synthesis of SIQ and opens up interesting areas for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of the available literature on value co-creation (VCC) and provide insightful future directions for research in this domain.

The extant literature on VCC has been reviewed by collecting relevant research papers based on certain specified delimiting criteria. A total of 110 research papers have been analysed to gain useful insights into VCC literature.

The study analyses the literature on VCC and provides a clear distinction between VCC and its closely related constructs in the literature. The study also draws significant insights from the VCC literature based on some specific parameters. Some frequently used theoretical perspectives have been discussed in the study, thus pointing towards a few alternative theories that can be used for future research. Finally, specific trends emerging from the literature have been discussed that provide a comprehensive understanding of the research inclinations of this concept, along with future scopes of research in the VCC domain.

The papers were selected for this study based on some delimiting criteria. Thus, the findings cannot be generalised for the entire research on VCC.

This paper fulfils the need for a systematic review of the extant literature on VCC. The study synthesises literature and bibliography on VCC from 2004 to 2019 to benefit both academics and practitioners and gives some directions to advance this domain of literature.