Search results

The purpose of this paper is to review key research contributions that may be useful for rethinking service innovation. Service innovation is not a monolithic construct; therefore, the opportunities for further research are multidimensional and interdisciplinary.

A summary analysis of extant literature identifies valuable contributions and fundamental methodological issues from various perspectives. The proposed directions for future research entail where to innovate, how to innovate, and what to innovate in services.

The analysis and discussion lead to a multidimensional framework of service innovation, with a particular emphasis on organizational and customer cocreation perspectives.

This article contains guidelines and real‐world examples to help practitioners and policy makers develop service innovation strategies through the consideration of different levels, organizations, and perspectives.

This article offers a relevant source of ideas and guidance for anyone interested in research and practice related to rethinking service innovation.

The paper's aim is to test the existence of the service recovery paradox.

To date, much of the literature exploring the service recovery paradox has generated mixed results. The paper argues that a service recovery paradox is a rare event, which makes its measurement difficult, since the “treatment group” sample size is usually too small to produce significant results. For that reason, the existence of the service recovery paradox in a banking context with more than 11,000 customer interviews based on actual customer encounters is tested.

Overall, the survey findings support the argument that a service recovery paradox is a rare event, and the hypothesized mean differences are, albeit significant, not very large, which diminishes their managerial relevance to some degree.

Because of the required extremely large sample size, no multi‐item measures were collected. Furthermore, privacy concerns restricted us from a longitudinal study and from linking the survey results to behavioural data. Both limitations are inherent in the chosen setting.

While a service failure offers an opportunity to create an excellent recovery, the likelihood of a service paradox is very low. The implications of verifying a service recovery paradox do not suggest that ineffective service followed by an outstanding service recovery is a viable strategy.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study testing not only the existence of the service recovery paradox, but also exploring its magnitude and frequency. This is crucial because the paradox is a very rare event, which, in turn, limits its managerial relevance.

The keys to effective service recovery are familiar to many throughout industry and academia. Nevertheless, overall customer satisfaction after a failure has not improved, and many managers claim their organizations cannot respond to and fix recurring problems quickly enough. Why does service recovery so often fail and what can managers do about it? This paper aims to address these issues.

The objective is to produce an interdisciplinary summary of the growing literature on service recovery, bringing together what each of the author's domain – management, marketing, and human resources management – has to offer. By contrasting those three perspectives using 141 academic sources, nine tensions between customer, process, and employee recovery are discovered.

It is argued that service recovery often fails due to the unresolved tensions found between the conflicting perspectives of customer recovery, process recovery, and employee recovery. Therefore, successful service recovery requires the integration of these different perspectives. This is summarized in the following definition: “Service recovery are the integrative actions a company takes to re‐establish customer satisfaction and loyalty after a service failure (customer recovery), to ensure that failure incidents encourage learning and process improvement (process recovery) and to train and reward employees for this purpose (employee recovery).”

Managers are not advised to directly address and solve the nine tensions between customer recovery, process recovery, and employee recovery. Instead, concentrating on the underlying cause of these tensions is recommended. That is, managers should strive to integrate service recovery efforts based upon a “service logic”; a balance of functional subcultures; strategy‐driven resolution of functional differences; data‐based decision making from the seamless collection and sharing of information; recovery metrics and rewards; and development of “T‐shaped” employees with a service, not just functional, mindset.

This paper provides an interdisciplinary view of the difficulties to implement a successful service recovery management. The contribution is twofold. First, specific tensions between customer, process and employee recovery are identified. Second, managers are offered recommendations of how to integrate the diverging perspectives.

Based on a review of the literature, this paper sets out to suggest that an organisation's service recovery procedures lead to three distinct outcomes; customer, process, and employee recoveries. The objective of the paper is to investigate the impact of service recovery procedures (i.e. the way service recovery is managed and executed) on these three outcomes and their relative impact on an organisation's financial performance.

A model, linking recovery procedures to the outcomes of recovery and financial performance, is tested using empirical data from a detailed survey of 60 organisations in the UK.

It would appear that many organisations and academic researchers have focused their efforts on customer recovery and have, to some extent, ignored the potentially higher impact outcomes of process and employee recovery. The main finding was that service recovery procedures have a greater impact on employees and process improvement than on customers. Furthermore, while many organisations appear to be concerned with service recovery few seem to be good at it or gaining the benefits of recovered customers, improved processes or recovered employees.

This paper tries to encourage wider research into the impact of service recovery. The main limitations were sample size and selection.

It challenges the way some organisations have focused their recovery procedures on satisfying or delighting customers and suggests that by doing so they are missing out on substantial benefits. It also suggests that many organisations have a long way to go to develop their recovery procedures.

This work proposes three outcomes of service recovery and finds that the impact of process and employee recoveries may be more significant than customer recovery.

Service recovery has attracted increasing attention in recent years as a result of the premise that service failures are inevitable, but dissatisfied customers are not. However, many methodological obstacles, e.g. the question of how failure and recovery incidents are collected, have not been overcome yet. In this article, the author suggests a process approach by which not only dissatisfied or complaining customers are surveyed but due attention is paid to a representative sample of both satisfied and dissatisfied customers. This approach is supported by the corresponding results, which is not surprising, since failure incidents and recoveries are indeed specific to indvidual processes. An analysis of the effect of good recoveries resulted in the recovery paradox being found in all but one process type.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that charisma is a collective representation, and that charismatic authority is a social status that derives more from the “recognition” of the followers than from the “magnetism” of the leaders. I contend further that a close reading of Max Weber shows that he, too, saw charisma in this light.

I develop my argument by a close reading of many of the most relevant texts on the subject. This includes not only the renowned texts on this subject by Max Weber, but also many books and articles that interpret or criticize Weber’s views.

I pay exceptionally close attention to key arguments and texts, several of which have been overlooked in the past.

Writers for whom charisma is personal magnetism tend to assume that charismatic rule is natural and that the full realization of democratic norms is unlikely. Authority, in this view, emanates from rulers unbound by popular constraint. I argue that, in fact, authority draws both its mandate and its energy from the public, and that rulers depend on the loyalty of their subjects, which is never assured. So charismatic claimants are dependent on popular choice, not vice versa.

I advocate a “culturalist” interpretation of Weber, which runs counter to the dominant “personalist” account. Conventional interpreters, under the sway of theology or mass psychology, misread Weber as a romantic, for whom charisma is primal and undemocratic rule is destiny. This essay offers a counter-reading.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

This paper aims to increase understanding of how the strength of the relationship between service failure-induced customer anger and revenge intentions might be influenced by attitudinal moderators that are both within and outside the realm of the service firm’s control. Drawing on past research, the authors hypothesize that customers’ perceptions of the corporate reputation and silent endurance constitute boundary conditions of the relationship between service failure-related customer anger and revenge intentions.

In line with past service failure research, the authors test the hypotheses using a scenario-based online experiment with 243 participants.

This research reaffirms the positive relationship between anger and revenge intentions and finds support for the hypothesized boundary conditions; customers with better corporate reputation perceptions and higher levels of silent endurance express weaker revenge intentions than those with poor corporate reputation perceptions and lower levels of silent endurance.

This research offers unique insights into how service organizations can buffer the detrimental effects of service failure-induced customer anger.