Customer Integration

Customers use services to create value for them. This value is measured with the construct of service value. New service concepts lead to activities that were previously carried out by service companies being "outsourced" to the customer. These service concepts are defined as self-service services. The project will systematically analyze how these self-service services generate value for customers and how this value and the value creation differs from services where the tasks are performed by the service provider. The new construct of self-service value will be introduced to address the differences and similarities.

An essential part in co-creating service is the contribution of customers throughout the service process. Understanding of customer contributions mainly adopt a provider perspective. Little attention has been given to the customers' perspective of their contribution to service co-creation. Hence, we adopt a customer dominant-logic perspective to understand customer contributions as to develop an approach capturing customers' phyiscal and mental contributions - understood as customer activities - as perceived by the customer.

Serving as a means to differentiate from competitors and generate greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, customer experiences are particularly interesting to marketing and to service researchers. Since service co-creation requires contributions from both customers and providers, the customer’s pivotal role in service co-creation greatly impacts customer experience formation.While service research has dedicated much attention on how to design and manage the provider sphere (i.e. physical service environment, service employees, service delivery processes), little work has been done on the customer sphere. Therefore, this research project focusses on how customers contribute to co-creating to the formation of their customer experience and what service firms can do to design and facilitate service co-creation to create positive customer experiences.

Customer experience has been a research front in service research and marketing in the past decades with a growing number of publications in the last years. Still this research field is largely dispersed across different domains within the marketing, service, and tourism research. To understand the evolution of the field, map its origins and trajectories, this research projects explores research output on customer experience drawing on bibliometric and text mining methods.

Inevitably, not all service encounters are experienced positively by customers. Indeed, customers often endure service failure, long waits or other customers who misbehave, to name only a few negative events. In such situations, customers likely want to stop and exit the service encounter. However, they may realize that this is impossible or unacceptable. They feel they must endure the negative event until the service process reaches a certain stage – they feel locked-in. We find that being locked-in constitutes a specific state of mind that impacts customers’ experience and behavior. Customer lock-in has both advantages and disadvantages for service providers. On the one hand, customers stay in the service environment; on the other hand, they may accumulate negative emotions and stress, which may lead them to participate less effectively or even misbehave. In this research project we aim to explore the scope of factors that cause lock-in as well as the consequences for the customers’ experience. Implications for service providers are twofold: First, the findings provide insights regarding the tools service providers have to increase or reduce customer lock-in perceptions. Second, the findings help service providers anticipate lock-in situations and understand how customers experience them, which helps to respond in a manner that improves the customer experience.

In Progress

Service blueprints, customer journey and service scripts are prominent concepts that have been used in the service literature to reflect the structure of service co-creation processes. While they reflect structuring elements, they treat the service co-creation as a provider-given structure. The dynamics of co-creation and perception are not covered in these concepts. It is therefore, necessary to understand how customers perceive and evalute the structure. To this end, this research projects takes a customer-centric and process-dynamic perspective to enhance the understanding of how customers structure service co-creation processes.

Designing and orchestrating sensory cues is critical to service co-creation, since sensory stimulation has been acknowledged to be central to the customers’ evaluation of service quality and their service experience. Moreover, sensory perception is an essential element of customers’ contribution to service co-creation. The predominant angle from which sensory perception in the literature has been addressed is stimulus centric. That is, research has been focusing on the effects of individual and combined cues on customers’ purchase decisions as well as mental and emotional reactions to specific cues. As a result, existing studies focus only on one sense or on a selection of senses. Thus, a true multisensory perspective is not reflected in research. Shedding light on service co-creation from an actor-centric perspective, the purpose of this research project is to understand how multisensory design, i.e., simultaneously considering all five senses, impacts service co-creation.

Service Transition, or Servitization, is a global trend that describes “the increased offering of fuller market packages or bundles of customer focused combinations of goods, services, support, self-service and knowledge in order to add value to core product offerings” (Vandermewe/Rada, 1988). Even though servitization seems to be an attractive strategy for manufacturers, it does not always yield the expected positive effects on revenues and firm value and sometimes the effects might even be negative, a phenomenon which is referred to as Service Paradox (Brax 2005, Gebauer et al. 2005). The lack of a clear definition or conceptualization of service transition strategies further hinders our understanding of the different factors that lead to a successful service transition. Therefore, the aim of this research project is first to examine the different conceptualizations of service transition strategies, in order to analyze in a next step why some companies are more successful with their service transition strategies than others. Since these are causally complex phenomena, a configurational approach and the set-theoretic method fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are adopted.

Organizations and their management, as part of society, are influenced by gender. The same is true for strategic change and change management. As the transformational process from a product-oriented to a service-oriented business logic (Kowalkowski et al., 2017), servitization can be assumed to also intersect with gender. However, servitization research has not considered the diverse ways in which gender influences values, behaviours and practices related to servitization. This project explores the potential of gender-in-management research to expand our knowledge and understanding of servitization. Specifically, I examine how the concepts of gender, diversity, masculinity and femininity relate to decision making, leadership, change and culture in servitization.

In Progress