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The purpose of this study is to investigate how the digital competence of academicians influences students’ engagement in learning activities in the face of the pandemic outbreak. In addition to this, the paper investigates how digital competence influences each dimension of student engagement (cognitive, affective and behavioural).

A cross-sectional, quantitative and explanatory research design was used to conduct the study. Data were gathered with an adopted questionnaire administered to a randomly selected sample of 500 university faculty members who were not digitally literate prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. Apart from the goodness of data tests, inferential statistics were applied to test hypotheses.

Results indicate a significant influence of teachers’ digital competence on student engagement and the pandemic outbreak positively moderates the relationship. Digital competence equally influences all three dimensions of student engagement.

The outbreak of COVID-19 made the adoption of digital life more compulsive and the nations with already available digital infrastructure and digital competence effectively minimized the adverse effect of social distancing as a result of the pandemic outbreak. Findings emphasize practitioners to focus on the digital capacity building of academicians and the provision of digital infrastructure to facilitate student engagement.

Society is transforming into a hi-tech lifestyle and technological advancement is penetrating almost every sphere of life at an unprecedented pace. From the digitalization of day-to-day affairs to e-governance, the adoption of technology is becoming a new normal. The outbreak of the pandemic overtook academic institutions equally. So, the social distancing compelled academicians and other stakeholders of universities to switchover from in-campus classes to online classes. The findings enrich the existing body of literature by explaining how digital competence has a determining role in ensuring student engagement amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

This research is a seminal work, as it tests the influence of digital competence on student engagement with the moderating role of the pandemic outbreak. To the best of the author’s knowledge, existing literature does not present this kind of research.

This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model.

An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a scenario-based experimental study were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Customer forgiveness positively influences customer engagement and plays a mediating role in the relationship between service recovery transparency and customer engagement. Additionally, timeliness and personalization moderate the positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness. The positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness is more apparent when levels of timeliness and personalization decrease.

To retain focal customers' engagement after a service failure, firms must obtain their forgiveness. One of the firm's online complaint handling strategies to increase the forgiveness level of focal customers is to provide a high level of service recovery transparency (i.e. responding to their complaints in a public channel), especially when the firm is unable to respond to online complaints quickly or provide highly personalized responses.

This research provides new insights into the underlying mechanism of customer engagement by applying the concept of customer forgiveness. It also contributes to the social influence theory by applying the essence of the theory to explain how other customers' virtual presence during the online complaint handling influences the forgiveness of focal customers in order to gain their engagement. Additionally, it provides insight into the conditions under which the role of service recovery transparency can be very effective in dealing with online complaints.

This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service organization’s ability to provide a desired level of service. The authors differentiate sudden large-scale general environmental threats from traditional service failures in scope and scale of impact via number of customers and sectors affected and duration and speed of the disruption.

This paper draws from service recovery theory to build a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions. The resulting conceptual model maps service failure recovery strategies against a service mega-disruption recovery approach to examine consumer response to changes in service value. This work further articulates additional research needs including conceptualization, measurement and methods as traditional drivers of service recovery and the value of the service experience change in response to service mega-disruptions.

This work proposes a research agenda to investigate whether service mega-disruptions can bypass the need for service recovery due to a consumer self-moderating process. As past research shows, the less control a service provider has over a failure, the more customers attribute fault to the situation and transfer blame away from an organization. This paper suggests that this self-moderating process disrupts the need for service providers to court forgiveness for a failure with perceptions of similarity and controllability providing an alternate pathway to customer forgiveness. Similarly, it is suggested that service mega-disruptions play a role in transforming service ecosystems into tighter, more contractual systems with less agency for service providers and poorer ability to adjust to market conditions. The duration and longevity of effects on service providers’ control, agency and ability to adjust following a service mega-disruption must be researched further.

This paper builds theory to develop a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions and their role in customer engagement and reshaping the service ecosystem. This paper culminates in the proposition of a research agenda that aims to build research capacity among services marketing scholars as service providers’ coordination and market conditions are challenged by service mega-disruptions.

Service failures usually occur in front of third-party customers. Third-party customers react emotionally and behaviorally to service failure and recovery efforts aimed at focal customers. However, there is a gap in the literature on how third-party customers react to a service failures incident and a recovery over another customer, depending on how socially close or distant they are from. This study investigates the effect of third-party customers' emotions on consumer forgiveness, negative word-of-mouth (WoM) and repatronage intentions in the service recovery process by comparing close and distant third-party customers.

This study utilizes a 2 (social distance to the focal customer: close, distant) × 2 (service recovery: yes, no) between-subjects design. The authors used a scenario-based experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. A total of 576 respondents were involved in the study.

The results from the authors' scenario-based experimental study show that positive and negative emotions felt by distant third-party customers are higher than those of close third-party customers. In addition, the effect of positive emotions on customer forgiveness is more substantial for distant third-party customers. Third, moderated-mediation analysis indicates that social distance has a moderator effect only on the relationship between positive emotions and customer forgiveness.

This study contributes to the service literature by comparing socially close and socially distant third-party customers' reactions to service failure and recovery attempts.

This research aims to investigate the influence of consumers' anticipated trust in service providers on brand switching intention and its underlying psychological mechanism. More importantly, this study explores the moderating role of type of service providers (human staff/humanoid robots/nonhumanoid robots).

This study adopted two single-factor between-subjects experimental designs and tested the hypotheses in two typical service failure scenarios: Study 1, a hotel scenario (N = 403); and Study 2, a restaurant scenario (N = 323).

The results suggest that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between consumers' anticipated trust and tolerance of service failure and that such tolerance has a mediating effect on the relationship between anticipated trust and brand switching intention. Moreover, when service failure is caused by a humanoid service robot, a moderate anticipated trust level of consumers is most conducive to increasing tolerance, which in turn reduces their propensity to switch brands.

This study examines the nature of the relationship between anticipated trust and tolerance in a service failure context, revealing an inverted U-shaped relationship. More importantly, the boundary conditions under which different service provides have an influence on this relationship are incorporated. Finally, this study explores the influence of service failure tolerance on brand switching intentions in a technological context, enriching consumer–brand relationship research.