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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (66)
Disclosing bad news to customers during service encounters is an unavoidable, demanding task that can generate significant stress for frontline employees (FLEs). Despite the pervasiveness of bad news disclosure in service contexts, prior research has not explicitly examined how FLEs prepare for or optimize the delivery of bad news, whether to reduc...
Purpose
Customer engagement (CE) literature features divergent definitions and conceptualizations. To clarify its meaning, antecedents and outcomes, this paper aims to propose that psychological customer engagement (PCE) is the mechanism by which customers’ readiness to engage influences behavioral customer engagement (BCE) in the form of in-role a...
Online reviews have profound impacts on firm success in terms of sales volume and how much customers are willing to pay, yet firms remain highly dependent on customers’ voluntary contributions. A popular way to increase the number of online reviews is to use product testing programs, which offer participants free products in exchange for writing re...
In its fourth European edition, this text provides coverage of the foundations of services marketing, placing the distinctive Gaps model at the centre of this approach. This new edition draws on the most recent research, and using up-to-date and topical examples, the book focuses on the development of customer relationships through service, outlini...
The Journal of Service Research (JSR) is one of the leading outlets in service research. It is international in scope and widely recognized among scholars, academicians, and practitioners for its original and well-executed research. In its 22 years of publishing, the journal has produced literary content considered classics in the service domain. W...
Purpose
The growing service sector has experienced several revolutions that have transformed the way services are created and delivered. In parallel, services increasingly pique the interest of scholars, resulting in an expanding body of knowledge. Accordingly, it is time to reflect on extant service research, assess its boundaries, and think about...
Purpose-The growing service sector has experienced several revolutions that have transformed the way services are created and delivered. In parallel, services increasingly pique the interest of scholars, resulting in an expanding body of knowledge. Accordingly, it is time to reflect on extant service research, assess its boundaries, and think about...
Recent meta-analyses provide clear insights into how service firms can benefit from relationship marketing, whereas investigations of customers’ relational benefits (1) are unclear about the absolute and relative strengths by which different relational benefit dimensions induce different customer responses and (2) have not simultaneously examined t...
Service organizations encourage employees to express positive emotions in service encounters, in the hope that customers “catch” these emotions and react positively. Yet customer and employee emotions could be mutually influential. To understand emotional exchanges in service encounters and their influences on customer outcomes, the current study m...
Purpose
Customers often experience negative emotions during service experiences. The ways that employees manage customers’ emotions and impressions about whether the service provider is concerned for them in such emotionally charged service encounters (ECSEs) is crucial, considering the criticality of the encounter. Drawing on cognitive appraisal t...
The literature establishes that customer and frontline employee (FLE) emotions converge during their encounters as a result of a transient, contagion-based process in which emotions flow from one actor to another. Recent evidence suggests, however, that this transient process does not produce emotional convergence among frontline dyads engaged in o...
This research investigates the influence that social sources in the service environment exert on customer unfriendliness. Drawing on social norms theory, the authors demonstrate that descriptive norms (i.e., what most people are perceived to be doing in a certain situation), in the form of unfriendliness by service employees and fellow customers, p...
Purpose
– Brand alliances take various forms, yet academic research has not investigated how value spillovers differ between partners. The purpose of this paper is to address psychological mechanisms to uncover consumers’ perceptions of a service alliance when a strong service brand partners with a weak one.
Design/methodology/approach
– An experi...
Customers often experience intense emotions during service encounters. Their perceptions of how well contact employees demonstrate emotional competence in emotionally charged service encounters can affect their service evaluations and loyalty intentions. Previous studies examining employees’ potential to behave in emotionally competent ways (i.e.,...
The Critical Incident Technique (CIT), a research method that relies on a set of procedures to collect, content analyze, and classify observations of human behavior, was introduced to the social sciences by Flanagan (1954) 60 years ago. Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990), who introduced CIT to the marketing discipline, define an incident as an obs...
While customer service shares many features with services, it differs in two key ways. First, customer service is offered in support of the core product and is not marketed separately. Second, customer service is typically offered for free and is not a revenue-generating activity. Customer service, most often performed by the seller's frontline emp...
The concept of employee-customer emotional contagion, defined as the flow of emotions from employees to service customers, and its impact on customers’ assessments of their service encounters with employees are examined in this paper. Drawing on interpersonal relationship research, we investigate the influence of service employees’ display of posit...
Service guarantees are an important feature of many service offerings because consumers recognize greater risk associated with the purchase of services than with the purchase of goods. Despite substantial service guarantee research in the past two decades though, no extant study has examined the return on service guarantee investments. To fill this...
Purpose – During service encounters, it has been suggested that emotionally competent employees are likely to succeed in building rapport with their customers, which in turn often leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, these relationships have not been empirically examined. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effect...
Moving call centers offshore may be an effective way to increase service productivity by lowering costs, yet recent research suggests that customers associate offshore call centers with lower service quality. This study clarifies customer evaluations of call centers with a field study that examines how customer perceptions of a foreign accent, call...
Purpose
Recent discussions of the service‐dominant logic (S‐D logic) and the creation of a multidisciplinary service science highlight the need for a paradigmatic discussion that provides directions for ongoing service research. This article aims to examine different epistemological foundations and proposes a framework to describe and better unders...
Using survey and transaction data from a natural experiment in a fast-food chain, the authors investigate the effects of store remodeling. They test (1) short- and long-term effects on customers' cognitions, affect, and behavioral intentions; (2) the moderating impact of spontaneous versus planned and group versus single-customer store visits; and...
Services marketing strategy focuses on delivering processes, experiences, and intangibles – rather than physical goods and discrete transactions – to customers. Delivering experiences successfully and building customer relationships are complicated undertakings involving many different strategies and tactics. Successful services marketing strategy...
Growing as an educator takes hard work and commitment. It requires the educator to engage in regular, objective self-examinations of instructional beliefs and behaviors. Although this task can be daunting, and unwieldy, due to the complexity of the teaching–learning exchange, it can also be undertaken in a systematic manner. This article proposes a...
This chapter presents a foundational framework for service science
– the Gaps Model of Service Quality. For over two decades the model has been used across industries and worldwide to help
companies formulate strategies to deliver quality service, to integrate customer focus across functions, and to provide a
foundation for service as a competitive...
Customer value has received much attention in the recent marketing literature, but relatively little research has specifically
focused on inclusion of service components when defining and operationalizing customer value. The purpose of this study is
to gain a deeper understanding of customer value by examining several service elements, namely servi...
During the past two decades, service guarantees have received increased attention as a means for service firms to attract and retain customers and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Although many academic studies, referring to diverse service guarantee aspects, have appeared during this time, a synthesis of research is needed to clarify wh...
Recent marketing literature pays particular attention to customer value because of the potential impact on customer behavior and, ultimately, firm performance. Whereas some studies conceptualize customer value in a unidimensional manner, more recent approaches take a multidimensional approach, generally conceptualizing value as composed of various...
The rapport between employees and customers represents a particularly salient issue in retail businesses characterized by significant interpersonal interactions. Although rapport relates significantly to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth communication, the behaviors employees use to develop rapport receive minimal attention in marke...
The marketing discipline’s knowledge about the drivers of service customers’ repeat purchase behavior is highly fragmented.
This research attempts to overcome that fragmented state of knowledge by making major advances toward a theory of repeat purchase
drivers for consumer services. Drawing on means–end theory, the authors develop a hierarchical c...
In this study, the authors examine the effects of two facets of employee emotions on customers' assessments of service encounters. Drawing on emotional contagion and emotional labor theories, they investigate the influence of the extent of service employees' display of positive emotions and the authenticity of their emotional labor display on custo...
In this study, the authors examine the effects of two facets of employee emotions on customers’ assessments of service encounters. Drawing on emotional contagion and emotional labor theories, they investigate the influence of the extent of service employees’ display of positive emotions and the authenticity of their emotional labor display on custo...
Customer relational benefits have been identified as a driving motivation for consumers to engage in long term relationships with service providers. Such benefits can be expected to play a crucial role in the success of service firms when extending their business into other countries and cultures. Most of the previous discussion of relational benef...
Through Web-based consumer opinion platforms (e.g., epinions.com), the Internet enables customers to share their opinions on, and experiences with, goods and services with a multitude of other consumers; that is, to engage in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication. Drawing on findings from research on virtual communities and traditional word...
The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) has been used in a variety of service contexts in recent years to explore ser- vice research issues and has been instrumental in advanc- ing our understanding of these issues. Despite the popularity of this methodology, no published research syn- thesis systematically examines this research. The primary purpose...
Empirically evaluates a model of service guarantees by addressing the impact of a service guarantee on consumers’ satisfaction evaluations. Proposes a model suggesting that the differentiating and signaling properties of a guarantee can influence service provider satisfaction and that a service guarantee may capitalize on the coproduction nature of...
Inconsistencies in perceptions between salespeople and sales managers have the potential for adverse effects on salesperson job-related outcomes. This study investigates the extent to which the direction and absolute size of these differences influence salesperson job-related outcomes. The results indicate salesperson-sales manager perceptions rega...
In guaranteeing the satisfaction of undergraduate students with the instructor’s performance, Gremler and McCollough in previous studies reported that undergraduate studentsgen erally approve of the concept of offering a student satisfaction guarantee for a course. Although they provided both qualitative and quantitative measures of students’attitu...
The importance of developing and maintaining enduring relationships with customers of service businesses is generally accepted in the marketing literature. A key challenge for researchers is to identify and understand how managerially controlled antecedent variables influence important relationship marketing outcomes (e.g., customer loyalty and wor...
A model is developed that identifies individual and dyadic antecedents and outcomes for a construct we have named service encounter emotional value (SEEVal). Service encounter emotional value is defined as the net emotional value the customer experiences added to the net emotional value the service provider employee experiences. Individual cognitiv...
In this study, we hypothesize and empirically test the proposition that interpersonal bonds, or relationships between employees and customers, can significantly influence positive word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. Such influence may be especially true for many services, particularly in situations where a relationship has developed between the cust...
A model is developed that identifies individual and dyadic antecedents and outcomes for a construct we have named service encounter emotional value (SEEVal). Individual cognitive and affective antecedents are identified. Emotional dyadic antecedents include rapport, emotional contagion, co-production of emotional labor, and relationship quality. Th...
Relationships are an important aspect of doing business, and few businesses can survive without establishing solid relationships with their customers. Although the marketing literature suggests that personal relationships can be important to service firms, little specificity has been provided as to which relational aspects should receive attention....
Business schools are often accused of focusing too much on quantitative and technical skills and spending too little time on interpersonal and communication skills. Experiential learning assignments provide an effective vehicle for addressing these concerns and are particularly well suited for services marketing courses. The objective of this artic...
Although relationship marketing has received much attention in recent years, most of the literature focuses on benefits the firm receives from developing relationships with customers. A comprehensive model explicitly considering both the benefits and barriers of such relationships from the customer’s perspective has not been proposed. To address th...
The influence of loyal customers can reach far beyond their proximate impact on the company. This impact is analogous to the ripple caused by a pebble tossed into a still pond. In this article we introduce the loyalty ripple effect construct and define it as the influence, both direct and indirect, customers have on a firm through (1) generating in...
Service guarantees, formal promises made to customers about the service they will receive, are rarely offered in university classes. In this article, the authors report on their experience in guaranteeing the satisfaction of undergraduate students with the instructor’s performance. The rationale for, success of, and lessons learned from this pedago...
This study reports on an exercise in guaranteeing the satisfaction of undergraduate students with the instructor’s performance. The guarantee was a modified version of that employed by McCollough and Gremler (1999) with the revisions intended to address some of the negative student perceptions they report. In addition to discussing revisions made t...
This research examines the benefits customers receive as a result of engaging in long-term relational exchanges with service
firms. Findings from two studies indicate that consumer relational benefits can be categorized into three distinct benefit
types: confidence, social, and special treatment benefits. Confidence benefits are received more and r...
Service organizations are continually looking for ways to increase customer loyalty. Although loyalty to tangible goods (i.e., brand loyalty) has been studied extensively by marketing scholars, relatively little theoretical or empirical research has examined loyalty to service organizations (i.e., service loyalty). This study extends previous loyal...
Social dimensions of service encounters contribute to consumer loyalty. Generally, social aspects of services are discussed in terms of functional qualities, that is, the style in which services are delivered. An analysis of interviews of service customers and providers suggests that functional qualities (e.g., appreciation and empathy) can be dist...
An internal customer's (i.e. employee's) satisfaction with a
service firm can be significantly influenced by service encounters
experienced with internal service providers. For example, a loan
officer's satisfaction with the bank he/she works for may well be
influenced by internal services provided by the data-processing group.
Introduces the conce...
The influence of loyal customers on a company can reach far beyond their proximate impact. We view this impact as analogous to the ripple caused by a pebble tossed into a still pond. In this paper we introduce the loyalty ripple effect and describe it as the influence, both direct and indirect, customers have on a firm by encouraging new customer p...
Contenido: El cliente como elemento central; Escuchar los requerimientos del cliente; Alineando la estrategia, diseño del servicio y estándares; Prestación y desempeño del servicio; Administrando las promesas de servicio; Panorama global: cómo cerrar todas las brechas.
Contenido: Partes I) Fundamentos para el marketing de servicios; II) Enfoque en el cliente; III) Comprender los requerimientos del cliente; IV) Alinear los diseños y los estándares del servicio; V) Entrega y desempeño del servicio; VI) Manejo de las promesas de servicio; VII) El servicio y la línea de fondo.
Questions
Question (1)
I am coauthor of a textbook. A new edition has just come out, and I am getting requests every day for a digital copy of the book. I do not have such a copy, and even if I did the publisher would not allow me to share it in this manner. So, I want to designate this publication as one that cannot/will not be shared via Research Gate. How can I do this?
