Search results

The unprecedented changes in the marketplace induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant accelerated corporate migration to virtual ecosystems have added several unique research opportunities and theoretical gaps, especially in business-to-business (B2B) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) markets in the service sector. Particularly, customer interactions in B2B services that were once sustained by the “people mix” now demand a huge overhaul in light of the “new normal” restrictions. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore how B2B service firms can engender firm value through virtual customer interactions during and in the post-COVID-19 era from an SME’s perspective.

This study adopts an exploratory qualitative inquiry to contribute to this discourse by proposing a conceptual framework based on prior literature and relevant theoretical frameworks, as well as qualitative interviews with SME managers, CEOs and/or owner-managers.

The qualitative findings reveal organizational preparedness, empathy, digital content and trust as key enablers of effective B2B virtual interaction that enhances cocreated value, thereby augmenting firm value. This study offers a much-needed examination of virtual interaction in B2B contexts and proposes a business customer virtual interaction model.

The exploratory nature of this study is one limitation, and future studies with a bigger representative sample size that uses survey or experimental data drawn from large enterprises might add value to the current findings. Also, while this study is conducted in dynamic markets due to the COVID-19 crisis, future research must examine the customer/firm’s experiences in other forms of crises-led market ecosystems.

B2B service firms must be strongly inclined to continuously take steps to develop and maintain virtual interaction with customers. Proactive efforts to familiarize internal and external stakeholders with virtual interaction platforms are a crucial step for effective customer engagement. The effectiveness of B2B virtual interactions can be strengthened through digital content that elicits trust and exhibits empathy, especially in crises led-markets. Also, the value created for the firm must be redeployed strategically to sustain positive customer engagement behaviors that continue to deliver value to the firm and the customer.

This paper contributes to the increasing B2B customer engagement literature by exploring the ongoing dialogue on how B2B firms can strive and succeed in the post-COVID-19 era or related crises-led market ecosystems through enhanced virtual B2B customer interaction efforts.

This study aims to investigate the impact of three types of online customer-to-customer interaction qualities on customers' participation intention through customer–firm affection in online mass service contexts to address the influence of several types of intercustomer interactions.

The data were amassed using retrospective experience sampling. The hypothesized relationships were examined utilizing structural equation modeling.

The results demonstrate that the perceived quality of the friend-interaction (e.g. [non-]verbal online interaction with friends), neighboring customer-interaction (e.g. [non-]verbal online interaction with stranger users) and the audience-interaction (crowding) has a significant impact upon customer participation intention, mediated by customer–firm affection.

This research was performed in the situation of online mass services (e.g. massively multiplayer online role-playing games). Future studies could extend the findings by conducting further studies across various types of services and by comparing results across different categories of mass services (e.g. hedonic vs utilitarian).

Online mass service marketers should focus on facilitating all three types of online customer-to-customer interactions (i.e. friend-, neighboring customer-, and audience-interaction). For example, online game developers may need to require users to communicate and collaborate with not only friends but also stranger users to progress and succeed in online multiplayer games.

The current study differs from prior research by addressing the influences of not only online intercustomer interaction qualities but also customer–firm affection on customer participation intention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of emotions in developing customer engagement and brand image during virtual service interactions. The authors explore the concept of engagement platforms (EPs) and how their extrinsic characteristics or cues (i.e. C2C interactions–and personalization-related cues) originate both non-transactional (i.e. customer engagement and brand image) and transactional (i.e. purchase intentions) responses. Specifically, the authors propose that customer emotions (i.e. pleasure, arousal and dominance) mediate the influence of EP cues on customer responses. The authors also analyze how the engagement developed during interactions in EPs contributes to brand image perceptions and the effect of these two concepts on purchase intentions.

Building on servicescapes and stimulus-organism-response theories, the present paper carries out two studies. Study 1 adopts an experimental approach to explore C2C interactions–and personalization-related cues. Study 2 focusses on the importance of customer emotions to foster engagement and brand image, and also analyzes their effect on purchase intentions. It employs structural equations modeling techniques. Both studies analyze the effect of customer engagement on brand image.

Findings corroborate that, during interactions in the platform, customer engagement with the firm influences brand image. Moreover, the pleasure and arousal experienced by customers influence their engagement while dominance modifies brand image. Finally, customer engagement and brand image have a positive effect on purchase behavior.

This paper contributes to research demonstrating the key role of emotions in interactions with EPs. The authors demonstrate the importance of fostering pleasant and arousing experiences to enhance the level of customer engagement with the firm in first interactions. Dominance constitutes a key dimension to improve brand image in EPs. Finally, the research demonstrates that engagement develops customers’ transactional behaviors and not only non-transactional ones, as seen in previous literature.

In digital worlds, EPs emerge as touch points beyond purchase that allow individuals to integrate resources and co-create value between them and with the firm. Despite the interest of BCPs, few works have analyzed how interactions with these platforms and the elicited emotions contribute to developing customer engagement and brand image, key factors for understanding customer participation and behavior in interactive media.

With the rapid development of information technologies and the internet, firms have increasingly focussed on customer interactions to realise value co-creation. Previous studies have empirically examined interaction orientation, but their measurements have been derived from goods-dominant logic and have not explained the mechanism of value co-creation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an operational definition and define the dimensions of interaction orientation based on value co-creation theory (IOVCC), and then develop a scale for it.

In this study, data were collected from employees via three questionnaire surveys, and then analysed using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

The findings are as follows: IOVCC represents a firm’s implementation of a set of marketing actions aimed at inserting the firm into its customers’ daily life practices and co-creating value with the customers. The construct of IOVCC consists of five behavioural dimensions: “building communication channels”, “involving customers in co-production”, “improving service capabilities”, “improving interaction quality” and “integrating interaction resources”. The measurement scale for IOVCC has acceptable levels of reliability, content validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity and nomological validity.

This study enriches the literature on value co-creation theory by revealing the process and actions of co-creating value. It also contributes to the understanding of service touchpoints by highlighting the interaction quality of touchpoints. In addition, the authors have developed a reliable and valid scale for IOVCC, thereby facilitating the measurement of a firm’s implementation of the “value co-creation” business philosophy.

Customer interaction in new service development is a key success factor for new services. However, the knowledge about the process and techniques of customer interaction in any Asian and emerging market is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to investigate the process of customer interaction in new service development in an emerging market – India.

The article is based on longitudinal case research involving 24 service firms, in which 48 managers and 24 customers were interviewed and the paper followed the development process of several new service projects in real time.

The research answers several critical questions involved in customer interaction in new service development that include: What are the modes of customer interaction in NSD? What are the stages of customer interaction? Whom a firm shall interact with? What is the role of employees in customer interaction? And what are the pitfalls in customer interaction process?

The results and findings of this study will help managers improve the odds of developing successful new services in the emerging markets.

The research is the first attempt to examine the customer interaction practice of service firms in an emerging market – India. Therefore, it contributes to the extant literature of new service development and innovation.

This methodological paper demonstrates how service firms can use digital technologies to quantify and predict customer evaluations of their interactions with the firm using unstructured, qualitative data. To harness the power of unstructured data and enhance the customer-firm relationship, the use of computerized text analysis is proposed.

Three empirical studies were conducted to exemplify the use of the computerized text analysis tool. A secondary data analysis of online customer reviews (n = 2,878) in a service industry was used. LIWC was used to conduct the text analysis, and thereafter SPSS was used to examine the predictive capability of the model for the evaluation of customer-firm interactions.

A lexical analysis of online customer reviews was able to predict evaluations of customer-firm interactions across the three empirical studies. The authenticity and emotional tone present in the reviews served as the best predictors of customer evaluations of their service interactions with the firm.

Computerized text analysis is an inexpensive digital tool which, to date, has been sparsely used to analyze customer-firm interactions based on customers' online reviews. From a methodological perspective, the use of this tool to gain insights from unstructured data provides the ability to gain an understanding of customers' real-time evaluations of their service interactions with a firm without collecting primary data.

This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge regarding the use of computerized lexical analysis to assess unstructured, online customer reviews to predict customers' evaluations of a service interaction. The results offer service firms an inexpensive and user-friendly methodology to assess real-time, readily available reviews, complementing traditional customer research. A tool has been used to transform unstructured data into a numerical format, quantifying customer evaluations of service interactions.

The paper aims to fill this gap by positing a framework that considers the service automation decision as a matter of knowledge management: a choice between human resident and codified knowledge assets.

The paper is a conceptual paper, grounded in the knowledge-based view.

The paper uses the information processing theory, which argues that the level of uncertainty in a process should dictate the type of knowledge deployed, as the contingency for the automation choice, and customer interaction uncertainty as the driver of that contingency. From these ideas, propositions are generated relating customer interaction uncertainty and service automation. Further implications for artificial intelligence (AI) are also explored.

The framework illuminates and informs the strategic choices regarding service automation, including the use of AI in professional services, a timely and highly important topic. It offers a valuable model for practitioners and contributes to the academic literature by pointing the way for future directions for scholarly research.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of interaction with the Muslim customers in developing new Islamic financial services in a secular and non-Muslim majority emerging country, India.

Data were collected using a multiple case study methodology in which the service managers of 23 financial service firms and their customers were interviewed. A total of 46 managers and 31 Muslim customers provided data for this paper.

A service firm must interact with its Muslim customers to obtain key input and information for developing new Islamic financial services, particularly in a Muslim minority country. The Muslim customers are willing to work with the financial service firms for the purpose of new service development and are a good source of information for new Islamic financial services.

The paper has implications for the financial service firms interested in achieving growth and prosperity by developing and marketing new services to the growing population of Muslim customers in the emerging markets, particularly India.

The issue of customer interaction in new service development is a key concept in the extant literature, yet no study has explored this concept for the Islamic banking and financial products in a non-Muslim majority emerging market. This is the first paper that has applied the customer interaction in new service development theory to the interaction process of Muslim customers in a non-Muslim majority country and, thus, addressed a worthwhile research gap.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the dialogue, access, risk assessment and transparency model of value co-creation processes (dialogue, access, risk and transparency) on new service market performance (NSMP) with the mediating role of value-informed pricing in the context of business-to-business (B2B).

The data were collected through a cross-sectional survey of 230 managers of the telecommunications industry in Malaysia and analyzed through structural equation modeling using SmartPLS v.3.3.3 software.

This study found that dialogue and transparency are predictors of NSMP. The findings indicate that value-informed pricing plays a mediating role in the relationship between dialogue and transparency with NSMP.

Disclosing pricing related information, providing up to date information to the customers, making clear to the customers about new offerings would certainly influence value-informed pricing. Thus, managers can enhance customer engagement in the interaction processes to better understand customer expectations of new services and how the new services should be priced.

The link between value co-creation and value-informed pricing has been only conceptualized in literature. This study has opened a new stream of research, examining the relationship of interactional-based value co-creation process with value-informed pricing and NSMP in the context of B2B relationship from providers’ perspective.

This paper aims to debate the technology-driven transformation of customer relationship management (CRM) into social CRM, which entails a shift from a transactional and automational solution to a customer experience management philosophy, reflecting high levels of customer empowerment.

A literature review provides a critical analysis of the concept, tenets, aims and implementation approaches of social CRM. Arguments are summarised by developing a process-based framework for implementing social CRM.

By adopting a value co-creation approach that recognises the technology-fostered customer empowerment, the social CRM highlights the need to immigrate from relationship management to relationship stewardship. In this vein, social CRM implementation should support and foster dialogue facilitation and customer engagement in co-creating customer experiences. To achieve these, five approaches for implementing social CRM are proposed: collecting, analysing and interpreting customer insight; monitoring and improving the performance of CRM; developing holistic and seamless personalised customer experiences; gamifying CRM and loyalty programmes; and nurturing community relationship management.

The five approaches to social CRM implementation are identified and validated based on current industry practices, theoretical arguments and anecdotal evidence of professionals’ perceptions about their outcomes. Future research is required to collect hard evidence showing the business and customer impacts of these approaches.

Social CRM immigrates relationship management from a transactional to a customer experience mindset that treats customers as co-creators of value and demands the tourism and hospitality firms to exploit the affordances of information and communication technologies to collect and analyse customer data for better understanding the customer; develop customer touch points that do not only aim to sell but also primarily aim to enhance the customer interactions and experiences; consider and treat the customers and the customer communities as co-creators, brand ambassadors and stewards of relations; and motivate and enable customer participation into value co-creation processes for developing customer experiences and building relationships.

Research in social CRM is emerging, but it mainly focusses on defining its scope and identifying the functionality and adoption of social CRM technology. The paper contributes to the literature by proposing five specific approaches and a process framework for implementing social CRM. Various directions for future research are also provided.