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.

Recent developments in marketing highlight the blurring of boundaries between firms and customers. The concept of customer engagement aggregates the multiple ways customer behaviors beyond transactions may influence the firm. However, the term is embryonic and academics and practitioners alike lack understanding on how customer engagement contributes to value co-creation. This paper marks the first attempt to conceptualize the role of customer engagement behavior (CEB) in value co-creation within a multi-stakeholder service system. We combine the theoretical perspectives of customer engagement and value co-creation research to the analysis of a rich case study of a public transport service system involving consumers, communities, businesses, and governmental organizations. Our findings describe drivers for CEB, identify four types of CEB, and explore the value outcomes experienced by various stakeholders. This paper proposes that CEB affects value co-creation by virtue of customers‟ diverse resource contributions towards the focal firm and/other stakeholders that modify and/or augment the offering, and/or affect other stakeholders‟ perceptions, preferences, expectations or actions towards the firm or its offering. Through inducing broader resource integration, CEB makes value co-creation a system level process. We offer nine research propositions explicating the connections CEB has to value co-creation by focal customers, the focal firm and other stakeholders. Our research suggests that firms focus greater attention on the resources that customers can contribute, explore the potential to engage diverse stakeholders around a common cause and

In this chapter, we take a customer-centric view of narrow artificial intelligence (AI), or task-specific AI applications. Because of the breadth and extent of AI applications, we limit our focus to service encounters—which are times when customers interact directly on the frontline with a service company or organization. The purpose is to illuminate the roles of AI in the context of frontline service encounters and to identify the potential benefits and negative consequences for customers of AI-supported, AI-augmented, and AI-performed services. We develop a conceptual framework of the antecedents and consequences of AI acceptance by customers grounded in previous research, theory, and practice. Previous research has examined the adoption of self-service technologies (SSTs) and established that innovation characteristics and individual differences predict role clarity, motivation and ability (RMA), which in turn predict adoption of SSTs (see Meuter et al. ; Blut et al. ). However, we believe that additional antecedents will come into play in predicting the acceptance of service encounter technologies tied to AI. Therefore, we expand the relevant set of antecedents beyond the established constructs and theories to include variables that are particularly relevant for AI applications such as privacy concerns, trust, and perceptions of “creepiness.” We also examine a broader set of potential consequences of customer acceptance of AI including what customers may experience (e.g., more personalized service encounters) and how AI may affect customers (e.g., lead to increased well-being due to more access to services). The chapter concludes with research questions and directions for the future tied directly to the conceptual framework.

Companies are allocating increasing coproduction workloads to consumers. Ironically, many consumers may be ill-equipped to coproduce, as indicated by widespread low service literacy (e.g., financial literacy, medical literacy). This research examines how consumers, particularly those low in service literacy, respond to varying levels of firm-assigned coproduction workload. Five studies, including a hospital field experiment, reveal three findings. First, service literacy plays a moderating role, such that higher (vs. lower) levels of coproduction workload improve service outcomes (e.g., compliance intentions), particularly for consumers with low service literacy. Second, coproduction eustress is a crucial mediator, such that positive service outcomes result from consumers appraising coproduction tasks as positive and meaningful challenges. In turn, eustress is elicited by consumers' belief that they are collaborating with the provider to achieve a shared goal. Third, offering organizational support to consumers might mitigate the beneficial effects of coproduction eustress because it can trigger reactance. This research can help policy makers and managers in finding new ways to activate consumers, particularly those low in service literacy, as coproducers for better service outcomes.

Qualitative field research based on long depth interviews with business-to-business customers who defected from a supplier relationship is used to develop an integrated theoretical framework explaining how the defection decision process unfolds over time in business-to-business relationships. The authors develop a taxonomy of events, both internal and external to the relationship, that are proposed to create "defection energy," or the motivation to move a customer from relationship status quo toward a defection decision. The framework illustrates how these internal and external events interact with the organization's and the individual decision maker's goals, practices, and values to engage a dynamic anchoring and updating mechanism based on accumulated defection energy that drives the process toward a decision threshold. The research offers marketers insights to improve defection management, including an understanding of how organizational and individual customer needs shape relationships; that defection decisions build as a result of multiple events over time, requiring a longer-term perspective on defection; and that defection decisions can be influenced by events outside the core product or service delivery process, suggesting that these decisions need to be understood within the broader context of the overall relationship.

En Estados Unidos, aunque las empresas han invertido en tecnologia, centros de llamadas y otros recursos (como la formacion de personal) para proporcionar un mejor servicio al cliente, muchos negocios estan descubriendo que poder generar clientes satisfechos y leales es mas dificil hoy que hace unos anos. ?Con que obstaculos se encuentran? Entre ellos, un abrumador aumento de las expectativas de los clientes, los desafios que plantean Internet, las redes sociales y el boca a boca online y una pobre ejecucion de las politicas corporativas en el ambito de la gestion de reclamaciones. Segun los autores, no hay duda de que la satisfaccion del cliente sigue siendo un problema importante a resolver. Asi pues, es necesario darle un nuevo enfoque.

The service encounter or the "moment of truth" is one of the foundational constructs of service marketing. One of the earliest and most cited papers on this topic defined the service encounter as "the dyadic interaction between a customer and a service provider" (Surprenant and Solomon 1987, p. 87), meaning the moment in time when a customer interacts directly with a service provider. A broader view of the construct was also prevalent in a definition provided by Shostack (1985, p. 243) who described the service encounter as "a period of time during which a consumer directly interacts with a service." This broader definition suggests the term "service encounter" encompasses not only dyadic interactions with employees, but also customer interactions with technology, other customers, physical facilities, and other elements of the service. Later, Bitner and Hubbert (1994, p. 74) added an element to the definition which distinguishes it further from longer events or experiences in delineating a service encounter as "a discrete event occurring over a definable period of time." Over the years, the term "service encounter" has come to encompass technology-based encounters along with encounters that occur in person, over the telephone, or through the mail, and even within organizations (Zeithaml et al. 2013, ch. 4). In tracing the term service encounter back to its origins, the earliest published papers on the topic include a paper by Solomon et al. (1985) appearing in the Journal of Marketing and a book entitled The Service Encounter (Czepiel et al. 1985).

The authors discusses customer service provision strategies at companies as of 2014, arguing that customer service departments are more successful when they provide solutions for problems while simultaneously treating customers with dignity and empathy. Topics include complaint resolution and the positive or negative impact of customer social media posts on companies.

Many service interactions require customers to actively participate, yet customers often do not participate at levels that optimize their outcomes, particularly in health care. To gain insight into how customers shape a service experience with highly uncertain outcomes, we construct a model on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The model is used to empirically assess how situation-specific emotions and customer participation during a health care service experience affect perceptions of the service provider. The model is tested using data from 190 medical clinic customers. Consistent with theory, results reveal that as customers’ relative affect levels become more positive, levels of participation increase as well. In turn, higher levels of positivity and participation improve customer perceptions of the quality of the service provider and satisfaction with the co-produced service experience. Implications of this research focus managers on designing services to help clients manage their emotions in ways that facilitate positivity and participation and thus improve service perceptions.

Smart interactive services, in contrast with other technology-based services, require significant human-to-human interaction and collaboration in addition to the service provided by the embedded technology itself. The authors’ foundational Delphi study confirms smart interactive services (e.g., remote diagnosis, remote repair of equipment, and telemedicine) are a rapidly growing innovation category across industries. Yet, gaining user acceptance of these types of services presents a significant challenge for managers. To address this challenge, the authors employ a grounded theory approach, drawing on depth interviews, to develop a framework of barriers and facilitators to users’ attitudinal and behavioral responses to smart interactive services. The findings reveal a new set of beliefs that are critical in this context. These beliefs are tied to the human element and specifically pertain to beliefs about the “service counterpart (SC),” who is the provider’s employee controlling the technology. Control, trustworthiness, and collaboration beliefs emerge jointly as important and interrelated influencers tied to the SC. Contrary to conventional wisdom that focuses on features of the technology itself to gain user acceptance, this research encourages providers to emphasize the interpersonal elements of the service by providing control cues, raising social presence, and enhancing human trust mechanisms.