Search

Purpose – Research on empowerment and service co-production assumed that customers want more control and that more control is better. An empirical test of this assumption, however, is lacking. The purpose of this paper is to test this assumption by not only focussing on the customer’s capacity and opportunity for control, but also taking into account the customer’s desire for control. Design/methodology/approach – This study uses an experiment employing video clips depicting a service encounter in a banking context in which control beliefs are manipulated. Findings – This study shows that more control in services is not always better because individuals vary in their desire for control; that state measures of control are effective predictors of relevant attitudinal and behavioral effects like satisfaction and loyalty, and that the mechanism which produces these effects is the consistency between control beliefs. Research limitations/implications – Future research on customer empowerment and service co-production should acknowledge the pivotal role of variations in desire for control, focus on inconsistencies in control beliefs to predict effects and measure control beliefs as varying states rather than as stable personality traits. Practical implications – Enhancing customer control of a service may primarily mean: giving the customer the option to control or not to control the service. Originality/value – This study contributes to literature and marketing practice by demonstrating that more control may have negative effects and by demonstrating the mechanism by which these effects occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – When a service fails, the guarantee policy of the firm can be employed as a recovery strategy. The terms of the guarantee determine the amount of payout and the ease of invoking the policy. The guarantee terms can, therefore, influence customer perceptions of recovery fairness and inferences about the firm’s intentions to provide fair recovery. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of guarantee terms on customer perceptions of justice, motive inferences, and repatronage intentions. Design/methodology/approach – A between-subjects experiment was conducted in parcel delivery services. Findings – Customer perceptions of justice vary across guarantee payout levels. Payout in the form of a discount does not restore justice perceptions, and leads to inferences that the firm offered the guarantee to maximize its profits. Conversely, full refund restores justice. Full refund plus discount is perceived as undeserved, and does not enhance justice perceptions. A moderately easy-to-invoke guarantee is perceived as fair, when it includes full refund. Inferences of negative firm’s motives, however, diminish perceived fairness of easy-to-invoke guarantees. Research limitations/implications – Future research could examine the interaction of guarantee scope with payout and ease of invocation, and how types of motives differentially impact justice perceptions. Practical implications – Full refund can enhance justice perceptions, whereas discount is perceived as unfair. Firms should offer full refund as guarantee payout, but refrain from offering a discount. Flexibility should be embedded in guarantee invocation procedures. Originality/value – This study demonstrates that service guarantees employed as recovery strategies signal justice and the firm’s motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, service innovation is just as important as product innovation. The ideation of service innovation, vis-à-vis product innovation, is user-oriented, rather than maker-oriented. Thus, capturing and understanding user context is key to being able to offer personalized and relevant services, and further identify new service opportunities. Therefore, a user-centric approach is needed in new service development, especially in the era of ubiquitous service. There exists a rich literature on how to incorporate customers into new service development, but most has focused only on their expressed needs, and failed to identify potential needs. In response, this paper proposes a 'user-centric service map', which first visualizes the portfolio of existing services based on the dictionary of potential needs and then helps to investigate vacuums that can provide a concrete shape for new service opportunities. The suggested approach is composed of three parts: first, constructing a potential needs dictionary, second, developing a service map, and finally, identifying new service opportunities. A case study of Apple's App Store services is conducted to verify the feasibility and utility of the proposed approach and offer strategic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts related to digital marketing including "The agony and the ecstasy of CRM in a smart grid world," by P. C. Honbein and R. F. Cammerano, "The death of personal service: Why retailers make consumers responsible for their own customer experience," by M. Stone and "Corporate blogs as tools for consumer segmentation-using cluster analysis for consumer profiling," by V. Ahuja and Y. Medury.

The article decomposes the influence behind the growth of service activities in the Indian economy over the last three decades into three components - the final demand effect, input structure effect and reallocation effect - and makes empirical assessments thereof. In terms of the influences, the behaviour of the group of services used basically as intermediate inputs, designated as category-I services, was distinct from the rest of heterogeneous services combined as 'community, social and personal services'. The study finds that apart from the final demand effect, the other two influences too played very important but different roles in different phases of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the emerging e-service quality literature by adopting a different approach to the dominant focus in previous research. The work centres on the internal perspective of organisation, studies the pure service sector and subjects the personal sales channel and the Internet channel to joint examination. A new conceptual framework is proposed via an adaptation of the service pyramid model [Parasuraman, A. (1996). Understanding and leveraging the role of customer service in external interactive and internal marketing. Paper presented at the 1996 Frontiers in Services Conference, Nashville, TN], and employee-orientated internal marketing and technology-orientated internal marketing are analysed as integrated drivers of commercial performance, within the context of retail banking in Spain. The results suggest that both marketing activities constitute part of a coherent strategy that is geared towards making and meeting service promises, within a multichannel perspective, and is associated with high commercial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, hotels in Cyprus have encountered difficult economic times due to increasing customer demands and strong internal industry development competition. The hospitality industry's main concern globally is to serve its customer's needs and desires, most of which are addressed through personal services. Hence, the hotel businesses that are able to provide quality services to its ever-demanding customers in a warm and efficient manner are those businesses which will be more likely to obtain a long term competitive advantage over their rivals. Ironically, the quality of services frequently cannot be fully appreciated until something goes wrong, and then, the poor quality of services can have long lasting lingering effects on the customer base and, hence, often is translated into a loss of business. Nevertheless, since the issue of delivery of hospitality services always involves people, this issue must center around the management of the human resource factor, and in particular, on the way which interacts with itself and with guests, as service encounters. In the eyes of guests, hospitality businesses will be viewed successful or failure, depending on the cumulative impact of the service encounters they have experienced on a personal level. Finally, since hotels are offering intangible and perishable personal service encounters, managing these services must be a paramount concern of any hotel business. As a preliminary exercise, visualize when you have last visited a hotel, or a restaurant, and then, ask yourself these questions: What did you feel about the quality of the experience? Was it a memorable one, which you would recommend it to others, or there were certain things, which could have made the difference? Thus, the way personalized services are provided can make the difference in attracting and retaining long-term customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]