Search results

Because new-age technologies are gaining a broader interest among service scholars and practitioners, it is critical to identify these technologies and examine the roles they play. The examination needs to be conducted to design engaging customer and service experiences in new phygital settings that connect physical and digital environments. This review article aims to provide researchers with a new comprehensive and integrative extended reality technology (ERT) framework. The framework serves as the basis for an all-inclusive view of ERT types in order to explore the different types of technology used to design phygital customer and service experiences.

This article reviews prior works on the role technology plays in terms of customer experiences across various fields of research, including consumer, marketing and service literature. Adopting an experiential and phygital perspective as well as considering a consumer standpoint, this article defines the scope of the ERT framework by identifying categories of new-age technologies and their effects related to the design of phygital customer and service experiences.

The ERT framework proposed in this article offers directions for future research by adopting an experiential approach to technologies in order to categorize additional technological devices, platforms and tools that can be considered in the design of phygital experiences following several extension processes. These processes can enhance the cognitive, social, sensory and contextual dimensions of the phygital experience and thus create a continuum in terms of customer value from physical to digital settings and vice versa.

Companies and service providers may benefit from a new, comprehensive, focused framework that assembles different types of technology. The technologies can be utilized to design engaging customer and service experiences that deliver customer value from physical to digital spaces and inversely.

No prior works have proposed a comprehensive ERT framework for service research following an experiential perspective and a consumer view of the experience occurring in a new setting: phygital. By embracing the ERT framework provided in this article, future service scholars can examine the dynamics and types of technologies that can positively or negatively affect the design of consumption and service experiences in phygital settings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges, interplay and potential directions for future service research to address the first three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of no poverty, zero hunger and good health and well-being.

This commentary examines how service research has addressed these SDGs in the literature, and through the development of a theory of change, the authors propose an agenda for service research going beyond serving, to enabling and transforming service systems, expanding the current focus on individual to community and population well-being through promotion and prevention.

Service research has increasingly advocated human-centered approaches but requires a shift towards an all of humanity perspective. Individual and collective well-being have gained attention in service research, emphasizing the importance of considering collective well-being.

The commentary underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to develop services that contribute to the well-being of the human species. It calls for research that transcends dyadic interactions, considers systemic dynamics and broadens the focus from individual to collective and population well-being.

This paper discusses important societal issues of poverty, hunger and good health and well-being and the need for integrated and ecosystem approaches to develop equitable and sustainable solutions for collective well-being.

While SDGs 1, 2 and 3 address individual goals, they collectively underpin the well-being of communities and societies.

The purpose of this special issue is to advance discussions on how the richness, complexities and challenges of the Middle East and Africa (MEA) context can contribute to the understanding of under-researched, as well as newly emerging, phenomena within the service research field.

This special issue of the Journal of Services Marketing consists of eight articles that focus on different service research topics emerging from the MEA region. The eight papers cover a variety of research methods (e.g. interviews, focus groups, ethnography, case study, survey), participants (e.g. customers, executives, households, refugees, human trafficking survivors, NGO leaders, government officials), countries (e.g. Zambia, Turkey, Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa, Senegal, Lebanon) and service industries (e.g. health care, finance, hospitality, faith-based services).

This editorial provides background information on the MEA context and proposes a unique research agenda for MEA development with a portfolio of intriguing research questions and inspiring opportunities for further research. Specifically, the editorial highlights six of the most promising and unique avenues for service research in the MEA context by considering the diversity and variations between the MEA nations: cultivate service inclusion; tackle service corruption and designing for justice; climate protection to mitigate further instability and conflict; closing the gap in digital technology: opportunities and challenges; prioritize essential service sectors (education, health care and tourism); and eradicate “service” poverty.

This special issue is a first attempt to explore the MEA region from a service research perspective. The editorial discusses unique challenges and opportunities from theoretical and managerial points of view and calls for embracing this region as the new frontier for service researchers.

While the customer brand engagement (CBE) research has advanced important insight, most studies to date explore CBE under regular, free-market conditions, yielding an important knowledge gap regarding its manifestation under less regular conditions, including disaster/pandemics. This study, therefore, aims to explore CBE with essential/non-essential service during COVID-19-prompted citizen lockdown.

Based on a review, the authors develop a framework of lockdown-based CBE with essential/non-essential service interactions, which are conceptualized by their respective capacity to meet differing needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. The authors view lockdown-based essential/non-essential service interactions to differentially impact CBE, as summarized in a set of propositions.

The framework depicts lockdown-based essential/non-essential service interactions and their respective impact on CBE. The authors propose two essential service modes (i.e. socially distant/platform-mediated interactions) and two non-essential service modes (i.e. service closure/platform-mediated interactions), which the authors hypothesize to differently affect CBE. Moreover, the authors view the associations between our lockdown-based service modes and CBE to be moderated by customers’ regulatory focus (i.e. promotion/prevention), as formalized in the propositions.

Given the authors’ focus on lockdown-based CBE, this paper adds unique insight to the literature. It also raises ample opportunities for further study, as outlined.

This study yields important managerial implications, including the suggested adoption of differing tactics/strategies to leverage promotion/prevention-focused customers’ brand engagement during lockdown.

By exploring the effects of lockdown-based essential/non-essential service modes on promotion/prevention-focused customers’ brand engagement, this paper adds novel insight.

This study aims to develop a better understanding of how online health community (OHC) members with different health literacy (HL) levels benefit from their participation, through the analysis and comparison of their resource integration (RI) processes. It investigates through a RI lens how the vulnerability of community members – captured as their level of HL – affects the benefits they derive from participation.

Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the effects of healthcare service users’ vulnerability. Data were collected about their profiles and levels of HL. Furthermore, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted.

The study demonstrates how low levels of HL act as a barrier to the integration of available online health resources. Participation in OHCs appears less beneficial for vulnerable users. Three types of benefits were identified at the individual level, namely, psychological quality-of-life, physical quality-of-life and learning. Benefits identified at the community level were: content generation and participation in the development of the community.

This study has implications for the understanding of how service users’ activities affect their own outcomes and how the vulnerability of users could be anticipated and considered in the design of the community.

Patients, when using healthcare services, (co)create value by integrating their own resources with those of a range of stakeholders. These resource integration activities, however, require different types of skills and effort from the patients, and different types of interactions with stakeholders, while also having different effects on patients' well-being. The purpose of the present study is to develop a better understanding of why some patients are better able or willing to perform resource integration activities that impact their well-being. To reach this objective, barriers and facilitators of these activities in their interactions with various stakeholders were identified.

The study uses a multiple case study design. Individual patients having received a lung transplant, together with their entourage (family, medical professionals, other patients) each represent a case. In-depth interviews were conducted with the patients and with various categories of stakeholders in their service delivery network who were relevant to their experience and with whom they integrated their resources.

The study identifies three levels on which barriers and facilitators of the resource integration process occur: the individual, relational and systemic level. Factors on these levels affect different aspects of the process.

This study takes a systems perspective and investigates how various systemic factors and stakeholders conduce or inhibit healthcare service users to perform resource integration activities, especially focusing on those activities that strongly affect their well-being.

Gamification introduces game-like properties into routine service processes to make them more engaging for service employees and users alike. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of gamification mechanics, or game design principles, on user engagement in gamified healthcare services.

Through observations, interviews and the study of desk materials, two cases of gamified healthcare services, each using different game mechanics, are analyzed.

Gamification mechanics produce four distinct experiential outcomes in patients: challenge, entertainment, social dynamics, and escapism. Patient engagement can be stimulated through these outcomes. However, to fully enjoy the benefits of gamified services, users are often expected to acquire and use new skills. The relative absence of these skills (or difficulties in acquiring them), depending on users’ medical predispositions and age, may defer or negatively moderate the positive effects of gamification on engagement. In the case of progressively decreasing capabilities (e.g. in the case of aging users or users with degenerative diseases, whose physical or mental disabilities may be emphasized by the mechanics), it is recommended that health professionals adapt the mechanics accordingly or search for alternative options to increase patient well-being.

The study was conducted in healthcare, and caution must be exercised in generalizing the findings to other domains. However, the finding that gamified service users’ disabilities - or the lack of required abilities – may negatively impact the encouraging or engaging effects of the use of gamification appears to be relatively universal.

This study contributes to service research, specifically in the healthcare domain, by providing insight into employees’ and users’ motivations for using gamified service processes, the experiential impact of gamification mechanics, the individual factors that influence users’ gamified experience and multiple forms of cognitive, emotional and behavioral engagement outcomes. A research agenda is developed.

Despite having inadequate resources, highly impoverished patients tend to seek and share health information over social media groups to improve each other’s well-being. This study aims to focus on access to health-care information for such patients and aims to provide an understanding of how online health-care communities (OHCs), as transformative service mediators, can be platforms for patients with chronic and nonchronic health conditions to share their experiences in a base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) context.

A large-scale survey among 658 respondents was conducted in a very low-income country. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

A model of patients’ experience sharing (PES), motivations and consequences for health-care services are introduced and tested. The result supports the PES model for patients with chronic health conditions, showing that utilitarian, hedonic and social value dimensions directly influence PES and indirectly influence patients’ continuance intention with OHCs and patient efforts. However, a mediating effect of PES was found only between the value dimensions and patients’ efforts. A negative moderation effect of medical mistrust was found in the relationship between utilitarian value and PES for both chronic and nonchronic patient groups.

This study is a pioneering attempt to develop and test a PES model in a BOP market.

The emergence and success of online brand communities in the marketplace have attracted considerable interest; this study seeks to determine the conditions in which people create social environments by investigating the drivers of connections to a focal online brand community and other brand communities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the composition of multi-community networks, focussing on the density and centrality of brand communities.

On the basis of insights from prior literature, the proposed model examines customers’ social relationships with multiple brand communities. A survey of 290 participants spans eight brand communities. The modeling process used structural equation modeling; the analysis of the social relationship among brand communities relied on an ego network approach.

Two drivers prompt connections to other online brand communities. First, personal identification with a core brand community enhances connections to other communities. Second, some core brand members choose a functionality-driven approach in creating social environments.

For marketers, this study highlights the importance of positioning the brand community as part of a social environment. To strengthen customer-brand relationships, marketers should focus on community members’ multiple memberships.

This paper extends understanding of online brand community members’ motivations to participate in a focal brand community. It also explains the creation of a social environment, through a careful consideration of participation in different brand communities and their relationships.

Decision‐making in early stages of technology‐based service (TBS) innovation projects proves to be challenging. Current failure rates in service innovation are high, while the investments in innovation projects are substantial. Research suggests that enhancing decision‐making in the screening stage could substantially increase success rates. By investigating the screening decision process from an information processing perspective, this article aims to identify antecedents of effective TBS screening decision‐making, and could thus help companies to enhance their decision‐making and reduce innovation project failure rates.

Reviewing literature regarding service innovation, new product screening and decision‐making under uncertainty, we identify antecedents of decision‐making effectiveness in the TBS screening stage. Hypotheses are developed and tested with data from 251 TBS innovation projects.

The study demonstrates the importance of decision‐making team composition, information use and decision perspective for innovation success. Decision‐maker experience and perspective mediate effects of team composition.

Further research is needed to investigate screening decision‐making. The authors provide a research agenda based on our findings.

The study helps screening committees enhance their decision‐making process, by optimizing committee composition, and making better use of decision maker experience and information.

Little is known about how decision makers exploit information and previous experience in dealing with the high levels of ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty in a TBS proposal screening setting. This is the first study to approach the problem from an information processing perspective.