Jamie Burton

• PhD MSc BSc
• Professor of Marketing MSM Division at The University of Manchester

Complexity surrounding the holistic nature of customer experience has made measuring customer perceptions of interactive service experiences challenging. At the same time, advances in technology and changes in methods for collecting explicit customer feedback are generating increasing volumes of unstructured textual data, making it difficult for ma...

Purpose While customer experience (CE) is recognized as a critical determinant of business success, both academics and managers are yet to find a means to gain a comprehensive understanding of CE cost-effectively. The authors argue that the application of relevant AI technology could help address this challenge. Employing interactively prompted nar...

Digital transformation in business solutions is offering opportunities for servitization to become more digitalized. In this context, digital servitization requires the actors involved to perform new roles and develop new capa- bilities. Although servitization actor capabilities in the digital transformation context have been addressed in prior stu...

Purpose This paper aims to examine experiences of low customer power in service interactions and the impact of those experiences on customers’ engagement and disengagement towards a firm. It subsequently identifies how such experiences may affect customers’ wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted visual elicitation interviews...

Servitization describes the addition of services to manufacturers' core product offerings to create additional customer value. This study aims to identify the key themes and research priorities in this body of literature over thirteen years from 2005 and 2017, based on four major research streams (general management, marketing, operations, and serv...

This paper critically examines the liminal geographies of the United Kingdom's 7,000‐mile canal and river network, embodying a thread of complex intersections and interactions between water and land. Drawing on a study involving stakeholder interviews, group discussion with canal users, and observational walks in Manchester and London, the paper ex...

Purpose Digital Service innovation (DSI) plays a fundamental role in the successful transition from product manufacturer or traditional service provider to a provider of digitally-enabled service solutions. Multiple impediments make managing this transformation using digital technologies difficult for firms, their customers and wider ecosystems. Ex...

Purpose Despite data being a hot topic, little is known about how data can be successfully used in interactions in business-to-business relationships, specifically in the boundary spanning contexts of firms working together to use data and create value. Hence, this study aims to investigate the boundary spanning context of data-driven customer valu...

Researchers are building increasing competence in the area of servitization with respect to manufacturing and more recently digital servitization. A much smaller volume of work considers the value of servitization for service organizations and ecosystems, despite early recognition that servitization is applicable to service providers, manufacturers...

Purpose An abundance of literature suggests that organisations adopting a cooperative approach achieve greater rewards than those that act in opposition or isolation. An emerging body of work also highlights the multiple actors involved in servitization. Despite this, in some contexts the benefits of servitization are not apparent. This paper exami...

Purpose This paper focusses on the darker side of the dynamics of servitization by exploring the tensions and territoriality that emerge between manufacturers and customers during the servitization process in the oil industry. Design/methodology/approach The Delphi method is used to explore the perspectives of three management tiers in oil organis...

As academics and scholars are increasingly recognizing customers’ active role in shaping their service experience and co-creating value, the marketing literature has witnessed a significant rise in research on customer engagement. According to Brodie et al. (2011), customer engagement denotes customers’ psychological state with a particular focal o...

Customer experience (CE) is the essence of what constitutes the interaction of a service and a customer. It is multidimensional and comprised of cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial, and social elements resulting from a direct or indirect interaction with a firm (Lemon and Verhoef 2016, p. 71). CE has many definitions and descriptions of its...

For manufacturers to deliver complex advanced services successfully, they usually need to be following a servitization process and to bring in new capabilities from their network. This paper explores how firms’ servitization activities may involve value appropriation (from the rest of the network), contrasting with the narrative norm for servitizat...

This paper examines mobility governance in an environment where varied mobility practices occur. Drawing on a quasi-ethnography of canal users in England and Wales, we discuss how multiple mobilities (including boating, walking, cycling and running) are practised in the relatively confined and linear spaces of canals and adjacent towpaths, and ofte...

This editorial calls for greater use of academic-practitioner workshops to co-create value for academics, practitioners and wider network actors through promotion of research relevance and sharing of problems, ideas and data. It describes how one such workshop, the 2nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop focusing on the design and d...

This editorial calls for greater use of academic-practitioner workshops to co-create value for academics, practitioners and wider network actors through promotion of research relevance and sharing of problems, ideas and data. It describes how one such workshop, the 2nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop focusing on the design and d...

Managing the customer experience has become a top priority for marketing managers and researchers. Research on customer experience management (CEM) has traditionally adopted a customer’s viewpoint. Few studies have explicitly embraced an organizational perspective, and existing research focuses mainly on business-to-consumer settings. The present s...

Servitization describes the addition of services to manufacturers' core product offerings to create additional customer value. This study aims to identify the key themes and research priorities in this body of literature over thirteen years from 2005 and 2017, based on four major research streams (general management, marketing, operations, and serv...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the role of servitization intent in the servitization process, and specifically the role dissonance (at an organizational level) in servitization intent can play in creating barriers to the servitization effort. Servitization intent is defined as the desire to achieve a future state of increased servitization...

Manufacturers face a number of challenges in implementing servitisation. This chapter on ‘servitisation practices’ explores how to overcome these challenges by aligning responses to different service strategies. A service strategy and challenge road map is presented, which includes four challenges: (1) interpret the market environment, (2) reorient...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance and extend the understanding of the underresearched concept of personal positive customer feedback (PCF). By comparing and contrasting front-line employees’ (FLEs) and customers’ perspectives, this study aims to develop a deeper understanding of the main elements, characteristics of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to critique the adequacy of efforts to capture the complexities of customer experience in a business-to-business (B2B) context using input–output measures. The paper introduces a strategic customer experience management framework to capture the complexity of B2B service interactions and discusses the value of o...

Purpose This paper aims to outline the purpose, planning, development and delivery of the “1st Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact workshop: Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Big Data” held at Alliance Manchester Business School on 18th and 19th January 2016, at which four subsequent papers were initially developed. Design/methodolog...

This paper explores the new service development (NSD) challenges that manufacturers face in undertaking servitization initiatives and their attempts to overcome these challenges. Prior work identifies some generic NSD challenges and manufacturers' responses to them. However, understanding how such responses relate to the manufacturer's services str...

This paper extends the understanding of positive customer feedback. Technological advances suggest future trends in customer feedback management will encompass ever advanced methods of data capture and analysis. Thus, feedback is increasingly likely to contain both negative and positive sentiment, as opposed to the predominantly isolated negative c...

Servitization is recognized as an opportunity for manufacturing firms to harvest additional value by accessing new sources of revenue and expanding their reach up and down the value chain. It is a network activity, as it involves not just the servitizing firm but actors across the firm’s ecosystem. Most studies argue that servitization creates valu...

This paper provides an ontology-based approach to extract customer intelligence from the unstructured social media dialog data. A UK telecoms company’s Twitter webcare was selected as a case study. The resources and activities of the company and customers in the app using experience were examined following the proposed ontology. We used text mining...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to challenge the focal firm perspective of much resource/capability research, identifying how a dyadic perspective facilitates identification of capabilities required for servitization. Design/methodology/approach Exploratory study consisting of seven dyadic relationships in five sectors. Findings An additiona...

Servitization involves manufacturers developing service offerings to grow revenue and profit. Advanced services, in particular, can facilitate a more service-focused organization and impact customers' business processes significantly. However, approaches to servitization are often discussed solely from the manufacturer's perspective; overlooking th...

Purpose To identify the commonalities and differences in manufacturers’ motivations to servitize. Design/methodology/approach UK study based on interviews with 40 managers in 25 companies in 12 sectors. Using the concept of product complexity, sectors were grouped using the Complex Products and Systems (CoPS) typology: non-complex products, comple...

Purpose – Front-line employee (FLE) well-being is an under-researched field. Contrasting the prevailing view that Positive Customer Feedback (PCF) can only have ‘positive’ impacts, this study aims to answer the counterintuitive question: Could the apparently positive construct ‘Positive Customer Feedback’ have a negative impact on the well-being of...

Purpose - To investigate which resources and capabilities are most important to enable large manufacturers undergoing servitization to develop and deliver successful services. Design/methodology/approach - A survey of 155 UK-based manufacturers provided the basis for the study. Data analysis was undertaken using confirmatory factor analysis and mu...

Purpose – Adopting the transformative service research (TSR) perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of positive customer feedback on the well-being of front-line employees, companies, and society. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the overlooked area of “positive feedback” is explored resulting in the development of t...

The Special session aimed at challenging the established theoretical focus and extending the analytical realm of prior service research.

Purpose - To investigate the resources and capabilities required by manufacturers to develop and deliver multi-vendor solutions. Design/methodology/approach - A multi-case design comprising six UK-based manufacturers: two from each of the aerospace/defence, information technology and telecommunications sectors. Findings - Manufacturers can be c...

Customer Experience Management: Enhancing Experience and Value Through Service Management represents a paradigm shift in how we think about customers and employees; customers and employees are perceived as partners, with an equal stake in the firm, rather than as external entities. Managers who conceptualize their offerings as essentially service o...

The paper demonstrates the impact of using text mining techniques to automate analysis and classification of large amounts of customer compliments and complaints (C&C). The research is using an empirical approach to generate a better understanding of how co-creation processes can be designed based on customer feedback experiences. In order to impro...

CRM is more than the tactical application of technology solutions; it is a broader strategic approach to managing customer relationships (Payne and Frow, 2005) in order to create value. This paper will review the challenges of creating the right organisational context to manage the value exchange, in order to create the right level of value for the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how product‐centric businesses (PCBs), operating in a business‐to‐business environment, configure their organizations to align services strategy with structure. PCBs are companies whose businesses were historically based on the products, rather than services, they sold. Design/methodology/approac...

Consumer reviews are accessible to a huge number of readers online, and thus this electronic word of mouth can affect product performance. This research uses template analysis of readers' stories and interviews to identify themes related to the reading of opinions on review websites (consumer-opinion portals), and within these themes, specific cons...

Power does not receive much attention in the services marketing literature, with factors such as trust and commitment (e.g. Morgan and Hunt 1994) attracting most attention. Yet power balances are important elements of many services relationships and understanding the significance of these can provide insight into the manner in which relationships d...

Marketing and Management Accounting (MA) have traditionally been seen as poles apart in terms of both focus and approach. Innovative developments in MA measures and increasing pressure on marketers to "prove" their worth, combined with technological advancements in database management are, however, contributing to a need for more effective synergy....

This research outlines empirical findings on Customer Relationship Portfolio Management (CRPM). CRPM has been a persistent stream of research within the relationship management field. This theoretical concept emphasises a resource-based integrated approach to the management of an organisation's customer relationships and has been largely inspired b...

Kim and Mauborgne [2000. Knowing a winning business idea when you see one. Harvard Business Review September–October, 129–138] (hereafter K&M (2000)) have suggested that there are just six drivers of ‘utility’ or consumer benefit that products and services are capable of providing: productivity; simplicity; convenience; risk reduction; fun and enha...

There is a general consensus that customer loyalty to service providers is not solely dependent upon their level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. However, the identified antecedents of loyalty remain, at best, highly speculative. The aim of this extensive literature review is to give some understanding of the nature of customer loyalty and the a...

Describes a qualitative research project involving a “narrowing” research process. The first stage involved initial, highly exploratory qualitative work. The findings led to a second stage that involved a review of relevant literature and secondary sources of data, followed by more focussed, focus group research into the issues uncovered. The probl...

Through Web-based consumer opinion platforms, the Internet enables customers to obtain electronic word of mouth from other consumers. Customer opinions are available to a vast number of other customers online, and therefore can be expected to have a significant impact on the success of goods and services. This paper describes a qualitative research...