Purpose A small group of pioneering founders led the creation and early evolution of the service research field. Decades later, this article shares timeless service wisdom from ten of those pioneering founders. Design/methodology/approach Bowen and Fisk specified three criteria by which to identify a pioneering founder. In total, 11 founders met the criteria (Bateson, Berry, Bitner, Brown, Chase, Edvardsson, Grönroos, Gummesson, Parasuraman, Schneider and Zeithaml) and were invited to join Bowen and Fisk – founders that also met the criteria as coauthors. Ten founders then answered a set of questions regarding their careers as service scholars and the state of the field. Findings Insightful reflections were provided by each of the ten pioneering founders. In addition, based on their synthesis of the reflections, Bowen and Fisk developed nine wisdom themes for service researchers to consider and to possibly act upon. Originality/value The service research field is in its fifth decade. This article offers a unique way to learn directly from the pioneering founders about the still-relevant history of the field, the founders' lives and contributions as service scholars and the founders' hopes and concerns for the service research field.

This manuscript draws attention to the dawn of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) and highlights its potential for addressing a host of issues within retail and service domains. With a retailing and service perspective, the authors outline the meaning of the 5IR, according to a 2 x 2 framework that categorizes retailers and service providers by their embrace of human-machine collaborations. They also propose an expanded definition of stakeholders in the 5IR (companies, employees, customers, and society). Merging digital, physical, and biological technologies promises enhanced well-being for societal actors across the board. By outlining these likely implications of the 5IR for retailing and services, this article establishes a roadmap for how the (r)evolution is likely to progress and offers a set of key research questions that emerge as a result. (C) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University.

Purpose Responding to an increasing call for a more comprehensive conceptualization of customer delight, the purpose of this paper is to expand the theory of customer delight and to examine the implications of such an expanded view for service theory and practice. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents the results of three qualitative studies. The first study explores customer delight through self-reported consumption experiences in customer-selected contexts, followed by one-on-one in-depth interviews. The second involves focus groups and the third examines self-reported incidents of delightful customer experiences. Findings This research finds that customer delight goes beyond extreme satisfaction and joy and surprise to include six properties that—individually or in combination—characterize customer delight. An expanded conceptualization of how customer delight can be defined is proposed in which customer delight is associated with various combinations of six properties – the customer experiencing positive emotions, interacting with others, successful problem-solving, engaging customer’s senses, timing of the events and sense of control that characterizes the customer's encounter. Research limitations/implications It is clear from the findings of this research that there is no single property that is associated with delight. Through the facilitation of multiple properties, managers have the potential to create a multitude of routes to delight. It is recommended that future research (1) identify and explicate these alternative routes for engendering delight using the six properties identified, and (2) develop a general typology based on service context and characteristics, customer segment, etc. that further stimulates scholarship on delight, and offers more industry-specific insights for managers. Practical implications Insights from this investigation will encourage managers and service designers to think more broadly and creatively about delight. Doing so will open up new opportunities for achieving customer delight, beyond merely focusing on extreme satisfaction or surprise and joy strategies currently dominating discussions of customer delight. Originality/value This paper makes several contributions to the service literature. First, it extends current conceptualizations of customer delight and offers an expanded definition. Next, it demonstrates how this new understanding extends the existing literature on delight. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future delight research and discusses managerial implications, opening up new opportunities for firms to design delightful customer experiences.

With liberalization and subsequent demonopolization in the fixed-line telephone service segment in India, the market scenario changed from that of single-player to multi-players. As the number of players increased, the level of expectations of the users has also increased, since in a competitive environment, the consumers not only have luxuries of choice but also have enough freedom to exert their preferences and thus enjoy a higher bargaining power. To match the expectations of the consumers, the Indian telcos have started providing them with a plethora of value additions, apart from the basic service offerings. At this juncture it is important to analyze the behavior of the service users, in the context of their expectations pertaining to fixed-line services versus their satisfaction levels of the same. This will provide enough insights on the gaps based on which suggestions can be provided to the players to sketch out new strategies, based on the demands of the hour. The paper examines the expectations and satisfaction levels of the service users, using fixed-line telephone services, and identifies the service gaps. It also provides the recommendations to the service providers to gain an edge in the highly competitive telecom market of India.

In many service contexts, customers share the service setting with other customers. However, knowledge about the influences of fellow customers’ copresence remains largely fragmented. We address this deficiency by introducing the integrative concept of customer copresence influence modes (CCIMs) and investigate its potential consequences for service perceptions and evaluations. Following a grounded theory approach and drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews with both managers and customers of a leading service company, we develop a typology of CCIMs, categorizing the various ways— interactions (reactive/proactive and social/instrumental), observations (information-seeking/comparative), and spillovers (spatial/behavioral)—in which fellow customers might influence the focal customer. Building on this typology, we propose a conceptual framework with a set of testable propositions about consequences of CCIMs for the focal customer’s service experience and the service provider’s image. The CCIM typology and propositional inventory, in addition to offering directions for further research, emphasize the need for service managers to pay special attention to customer copresence because (1) its influence on service experience is contingent on a variety of factors, including some within the managers’ control, and (2) customers might assign responsibility to the service provider for both desirable and detrimental effects of customer copresence.

This article contains a set of six invited commentaries written by leading scholars, expressing varied perspectives on the future of frontline research and on the frontline domain itself. The article accompanies the Journal of Service Research special issue on organizational frontlines. In their commentaries, the authors share insightful views on areas of personal interest ranging from employee emotion and customer relationship building to the effect of technology and its implementation at the organizational frontline. Included within each commentary are managerial insights and suggestions for needed research in the highlighted area.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the cross-cultural validity of the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) (Parasuraman, 2000) and explore how demographics and attitudinal variables may help to explain adoption and use of technology-based products and services. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on surveys conducted with probabilistic samples from two culturally distant countries, the USA and Chile. Findings Results support the TRI’s cross-cultural validity. They also suggest that demographic variables do matter when explaining people’s willingness to adopt new technology, with education being the most consistent predictor. Moreover, some of the findings seem to challenge the attitude-behavior consistency implied by conventional theory – while attitudinal variables are better predictors of pro-technological behavior in the USA, with technology-related insecurity being the most important of four attitudinal dimensions included in the analysis, demographic variables perform as better predictors in Chile, with educational level outperforming age and gender. Originality/value This is the first-ever cross-cultural test of the TRI using actual consumer samples from two culturally very different countries.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for understanding service design and how service design relates to central concepts within service marketing.Design/methodology/approach– For companies, service design is growing in importance and has become a crucial capability to survive in the service-dominant economy. Service design increases the capacity to improve not only service experiences but also organizational design. On this premise, the authors propose a conceptual framework.Findings– By relating service design to research efforts within service marketing, dual value creation can be enhanced. As such, the conceptual framework portrays service design as an enhancer of customer experience and organizational performance.Originality/value– To the authors knowledge, service design has not been discussed in the service marketing literature. Thus, this is the first attempt to see service design in light of well-established service marketing models such as SERVQUAL and an updated version of the Service-profit-chain.

The context in which service is delivered and experienced has, in many respects, fundamentally changed. For instance, advances in technology, especially information technology, are leading to a proliferation of revolutionary services and changing how customers serve themselves before, during, and after purchase. To understand this changing landscape, the authors engaged in an international and interdisciplinary research effort to identify research priorities that have the potential to advance the service field and benefit customers, organizations, and society. The priority-setting process was informed by roundtable discussions with researchers affiliated with service research centers and networks located around the world and resulted in the following 12 service research priorities: stimulating service innovation, facilitating servitization, service infusion, and solutions, understanding organization and employee issues relevant to successful service, developing service networks and systems, leveraging service design, using big data to advance service, understanding value creation, enhancing the service experience, improving well-being through transformative service, measuring and optimizing service performance and impact, understanding service in a global context, and leveraging technology to advance service. For each priority, the authors identified important specific service topics and related research questions. Then, through an online survey, service researchers assessed the subtopics’ perceived importance and the service field’s extant knowledge about them. Although all the priorities and related topics were deemed important, the results show that topics related to transformative service and measuring and optimizing service performance are particularly important for advancing the service field along with big data, which had the largest gap between importance and current knowledge of the field. The authors present key challenges that should be addressed to move the field forward and conclude with a discussion of the need for additional interdisciplinary research.

The role of technology in customer-company interactions and the number of technology-based products and services have been growing rapidly. Although these developments have benefited customers, there is also evidence of increasing customer frustration in dealing with technology-based systems. Drawing on insights from the extant literature and extensive qualitative research on customer reactions to technology, this article first proposes the construct of technology readiness of people and discusses its conceptualization. It then describes a program of research that was undertaken to operationalize the construct, develop and refine a multiple-item scale to measure it, and assess the scale’s psychometric properties. The article concludes with a discussion of potential practical applications of the scale and an agenda for additional research aimed at deepening our understanding of technology’s role in marketing to and serving customers.

The objective of this study was to test the external validity of the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) in a develop- ing country. A hypothesis was formulated in order to test predictability of demographics and attitudinal variables with intention to embrace and use technology-based products and services. The TRI taxonomy of five-segments was also tested with a hypothesis. The survey was conducted in Spanish using a professionally translated version of the 36-item TRI, with the same 5-point scale format as the original TRI study (Parasuraman, 2000). Results indicate that demographic variables still matter when explaining people’s willingness to adopt new technology, age being the most consistent predictor. Results also provide evidence that attitude gets more importance than demographics when the potential adoption of a new technology may carry some potential risks of being affected either economically or phys- ically. The cluster analysis procedure indicated that a four-cluster solution provided the best grouping of respondents into meaningful segments. Only 13% of Chileans can be classified as explorers (compared to around 15-20% in the U.S.). The explorers combined with 27% of Chileans classified as pioneers, constitute 40% of the Chilean population that is likely to be ready to immediately accept new technologies. Also, a discussion of the potential effect of specific national cultural dimensions is provided.

The objective of this study is to test the external validity of the Technology Readiness Index (TRI; Parasuraman, 2000) by investigating consumers’ Technology Readiness (TR) in a developing country. Hypotheses were formulated to test the ability of demographics and attitudinal variables to predict intention to embrace and use technology-based products and services. The study is based on a survey conducted in Chile, using a professionally translated version of the original 36-item TRI into Spanish. Results indicate that demographic variables do matter in the developing country context when explaining people’s willingness to adopt new technology, with age being the most consistent predictor. However, results also provide evidence that attitude is more important than demographics when the potential adoption of a new technology carries potential financial or physical risks for the user. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential effect of national cultural dimensions on consumers’ readiness to adopt technology-based goods.

The Technology Readiness Index (TRI), a 36-item scale to measure people’s propensity to embrace and use cutting-edge technologies, was published in the Journal of Service Research over a decade ago. Researchers have since used it in a variety of contexts in over two dozen countries. Meanwhile, several revolutionary technologies (mobile commerce, social media, and cloud computing) that were in their infancy just a decade ago are now pervasive and significantly impacting people’s lives. Based on insights from extensive experience with the TRI and given the significant changes in the technology landscape, the authors undertook a two-phase research project to update and streamline the TRI. After providing a brief overview of technology readiness and the original TRI, this article (a) describes the multiple research stages and analyses that produced TRI 2.0, a 16-item scale; (b) compares TRI 2.0 with the original TRI in terms of content, structure, and psychometric properties; and (c) demonstrates TRI 2.0’s reliability, validity, and usefulness as a customer segmentation tool. The article concludes with potential applications of TRI 2.0 and directions for future research.

Service innovation is a primary source of competitive advantage and a research priority. However, empirical evidence about the impact of innovativeness on new service adoption is inconclusive. A plausible explanation is that service innovation has thus far been studied using new product frameworks that do not fully capture the complexity of new service assessments by customers. We propose a different, holistic framework, which posits that new service adoption does not depend on individual service attributes, but on specific configurations of such attributes. We investigate this framework in a luxury hotel service context, using qualitative comparative analysis, a set-membership technique that is new to service research and suitable for configuration analyses. Results confirm that individual service attributes have complex trade-off effects and that only specific combinations of attributes act as sufficient conditions for new service adoption. Moreover, the composition of such combinations differs according to the different coproduction requirements. Our findings contribute to managerial practice by providing new insights for improving the service-development process and the launch strategy for new services. They also augment extant service knowledge by demonstrating why interdependencies among various innovation attributes are important to consider for gaining an accurate understanding of new service adoption.

Scientific discussion is focused on a current problem concerning service quality management in rural tourism sector. Author presents the problem, which covers the elements of quality management of rural tourism services, describes the service quality management model as a result of up-grade regional tourism. The process of delivery of rural tourism services is based upon the implications of regional traditions and products. Diversification of rural tourism services is forced on investigation the conditions, under which the regional rural tourism could become more competitive, or creation the possibilities to affect the consumer expectations, and increase their sensitivity to regional products and rural tourism services. Service quality management of rural tourism is fitted on creation tight relationship upon the consumers. Besides, the gain from changes of service quality builds the preconditions to change content and price of services, and to propose for consumers new quality of services, which could be identified as competitiveness of rural tourism farmsteads or focused on growth of consumer loyalty. Rural tourism, rural tourism services, quality of services, service quality management, changes of service quality, competitiveness, consumer loyalty.

This paper introduces a new breed of technology, Internet-based customer service systems (ICSS) that may revolutionize customer service in the new economy. ICSS is enabled by two existing technologies: the Web and the data warehouse. The primary goal of the ICSS technology is to optimize Internet-based interaction by regulating the frequency and quantity of interaction based on customer need.

Today, call center employees’ service encounters with external customers are extensively supported with modern information technology (IT). However, prior research on service quality and zone of tolerance (ZOT) focuses primarily on external customers with little attention paid to how internal customers (e.g., service employees) respond to services provided by internal functions, particularly IT function that supports employees’ IT use. Drawing on theory of administrative behavior and IT success literature, we conducted a study at a call center of a telecommunications firm and found that the impact of internal IT service quality (ITSQ) on employees’ service quality (ESQ) to external customers, as well as on their satisfaction with and use of the deployed technology, exhibits a positive diminishing pattern as ITSQ increases from below to within and to above the ZOT. We also found that ITSQ’s impact on ESQ employees' satisfaction with technology changes more dramatically around adequate service level than desired service level. Finally, we show that call center employees’ satisfaction with technology partially mediates ITSQ’s impact on ESQ. Besides adding to the service and IT literature, our findings suggest that managers should understand internal customers’ different levels of expectations toward internal IT service and the differential performance impacts of those levels.