Technology continues to transform firm-customer interactions, creating increasingly complex configurations of human and machine interfaces. Orchestrating the actions of widely distributed actors and systems has proven difficult. Agentic commerce, involving interactions between autonomous machines, will add complexity, shift points of marketing influence, and require new tactics. The frontlines have changed faster than scholars’ approaches to studying them, and the gap is widening precisely when decision makers need guidance. Closing this gap requires four imperatives: adopt empirics-first thinking, provide more credible evidence, lead practice – inform decisions, and be prescient.
This multilevel study investigates customer service digitalization (CSD), the customer-facing transformation of service processes through digital technologies, in retailing through fifty-two expert interviews with twenty-seven headquarters (HQ) managers, eleven store managers (SMs), and fourteen frontline employees (FLEs). Grounded in a theories-in-use approach and guided by Technology Framing Theory (TFT), the study identifies systematic framing differences between HQ and stores. While HQ managers frame CSD as digitalization, human augmentation, and a continuous “journey,” FLEs perceive CSD as digitization, human substitution, and a fixed “destination.” As boundary spanners between HQ and FLEs, SMs can reinforce these frames and are seen as either enablers or barriers. The study introduces four collective congruence framing mechanisms (CCFMs), namely Ba, Psychological Safety, Redundancies, and Nudging, that buffer the negative consequences of frame incongruence on CSD success and, ultimately, customer service interaction quality; SM boundary spanning strengthens their effectiveness. These findings extend TFT to a multi-actor, multilevel service context. For managers, they suggest diagnosing frame incongruence before rollout, deploying CCFM instantiations such as HQ store days or temporary redundancies, and developing SMs as translators between HQ strategy and frontline practice.
Corporate transformative service initiatives (CTSIs) are service-led initiatives by for-profit firms that serve communities experiencing vulnerability and articulate an explicit well-being intent. When disclosed, as with other corporate disclosures, they can function as market-facing signals of firms’ enacted service-oriented societal engagement. However, it remains unclear whether such signaling improves financial outcomes and whether firm-level factors moderate this effect. To address this gap, this study examines the impact of CTSIs disclosures on firms’ financial outcomes and the moderating roles of chief marketing officer (CMO) presence, relative firm size, and firm type. A systematic automated content analysis of sustainability reports, cross-checked with annual reports from 2010 to 2019 for U.S. S&P 500 firms, identifies three main forms of CTSIs disclosures: corporate commitment, corporate giving, and employee volunteering. Dynamic panel analyses show that CTSIs disclosures and their components positively impact firms’ financial outcomes (Total q , return on equity), with stronger effects when a CMO is present. Relative firm size matters, with firms with greater relative asset size benefiting more strongly when a CMO is present, and smaller firms showing broader gains across CTSIs disclosure dimensions. The signaling effects of CTSIs disclosures are consistent across service and non-service firms, suggesting that market responses are driven by the communication of service-oriented transformative initiatives rather than by industry boundaries. These findings extend transformative service research and signaling theory by showing how CTSIs disclosures can position service-led initiatives as financially relevant market signals, with implications for managerial disclosure practice.
This paper investigates service interaction vulnerability (SIV) within emergency departments, where both patients and providers are susceptible to heightened vulnerability. Providers face exhaustion from long shifts, high patient volumes, challenging patient behaviors, and systemic constraints contributing to emotional exhaustion. Patients, meanwhile, feel vulnerable due to illness or injury and their dependency on providers, compounded by the ways in which presenting certain characteristics, such as intimate partner violence, substance use, or suicidal ideation, can shape how they are perceived and treated in the system. These dynamics often result in unintended negative consequences that exacerbate perceived vulnerability for both patients and providers. Employing a mixed-method approach, including hospital data analysis and netnography, this study introduces a theoretical framework for SIV that illuminates how patient–provider interactions can exacerbate or mitigate vulnerabilities. By examining how these interactions shape the likelihood of service failure or successful service encounters, the study advances understanding of dual vulnerability in high-stakes service contexts.
Nearly one billion people suffer from mental disorders globally, yet 35 to 85 percent receive no treatment even when services are available, affordable, and known to them. This paradox suggests that the primary barrier to utilization is not only structural supply failure but also behavioral friction at the mental health service entry threshold. Drawing on sludge theory and administrative burden research, we conceptualize these barriers as service sludge—cognitive, emotional, and process frictions preventing vulnerable consumers from crossing the threshold. We adopt a design science research methodology and design MyMatcher, an AI-mediated service gateway—a pre-encounter frontline entity comprising three modules: a sensing engine that infers clinical intent from vernacular distress language, a low automated social presence (ASP) chatbot designed to reduce the social risk of disclosure, and a provider-matching module that collapses provider search into a curated shortlist. Through diagnostic and evaluative interviews with mental health practitioners, complemented by classification validation on a labeled corpus of over 4,000 texts, we derive three design principles and three research propositions for de-sludging high-friction service frontlines. Theoretically, we extend the 3A (Affordability, Access, and Awareness) framework by introducing Agency as a fourth behavioral dimension; we introduce the service gateway as a pre-encounter entity distinct from augmentation and substitution models; and we theorize an inversion of intimacy, the proposition that lower ASP facilitates sensitive disclosure in stigma-laden contexts, which qualifies a central assumption in service technology research. The framework is designed to generalize beyond mental health to high-stigma, high-complexity domains where behavioral frictions prevent consumers from acting on structural access to relevant services.
