Jochen Wirtz

National University of Singapore | NUS · Marketing

This article integrates relevant literature to develop a conceptual model on the potential avenues to achieve service excellence at low unit costs, which we term cost-effective service excellence (CESE). To gain a deeper understanding of these strategies, their applicability and interrelatedness, we analyze how 10 organizations have achieved CESE....

This is the first book on Intelligent Automation (IA). Also called Hyperautomation, it is one of the most recent trends in the broad field of artificial intelligence. IA is a cutting-edge combination of methods and technologies, involving people, organizations, machine learning, low-code platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and more. ------...

Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy is the ninth edition of the globally leading textbook for Services Marketing by Jochen Wirtz and Christopher Lovelock, extensively updated to feature the latest academic research, industry trends, and technology, social media and case examples. This book takes on a strong managerial approach presen...

Digitization, artificial intelligence, and service robots carry serious ethical, privacy, and fairness risks. Using the lens of corporate digital responsibility (CDR), we examine these risks and their mitigation in service firms and make five contributions. First, we show that CDR is critical in service contexts because of the vast streams of custo...

This new edition has been revised significantly since the third edition to capture the reality of today’s world, incorporating the latest academic and managerial thinking on intelligent automation (IA), service robots, AI, platform business models, peer-to-peer sharing economy, and cost-effective service excellence while illustrating cutting-edge s...

Purpose – Although humanoid robots are increasingly adopted in many business settings, the dynamic effects of anthropomorphism and the functional perceptions of service robots on consumers’ responses remain unclear. This research examines the impacts of robot anthropomorphism on consumers’ trust, receptivity, and the downstream effect on satisfacti...

Purpose – Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration. Design/methodology/approach – This conc...

Recent research has established a positive relationship between the use of service robots powered by artificial intelligence in hospitality firms and customer satisfaction online ratings, a particularly important form of electronic word of mouth. However, it is not clear if and how this relationship is augmented or diminished by moderating factors....

This article provides a systematic literature review of the hospitality, leisure, tourism, business, and management literature on luxury hospitality. We use a data-driven quantitative method (i.e., bibliometric review) to provide an integrated view of extant luxury hospitality research. The bibliographic coupling analysis allowed us to outline the...

Purpose: What role do consumers play in constructing their own luxury experiences? Challenging the dominant product-focus in luxury conceptualizations, this research note conceptualizes agentic luxury in the context of luxury services. Drawing on extant luxury research, we propose how consumers may take on more active roles in enacting their own lu...

The world economy received a significant boost during the late eighteenth century with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which introduced automated manufacturing processes.KeywordsIntelligent AutomationService RobotsArtificial IntelligenceChatGPTMetaverseEthics, Service Revolution

Expressions of dominance present potentially powerful nonverbal means for interpersonal marketing communications. Yet, research on the persuasiveness of nonverbal dominance has generated seemingly contradictory results. To reconcile these and establish whether there is a meaningful link between nonverbal dominance and persuasive outcomes, our study...

The industrial revolutions of the late 18th century provided a tremendous boost to our economy by introducing automated manufacturing processes. This revolution paved the way for higher quality, cost-effective products available to mass markets and freed people from tedious and laborious manual work - drastically improving our standard of living! W...

This study introduces affect-as-information theory to the service encounter context and advances that customer and employee affective displays during a service encounter together estimate post-encounter customer satisfaction (CSAT). A large-scale dataset of 23,645 real-life text-based (i.e., chat) service encounters with a total of 301,280 genuine...

Intelligent Automation in form of robots, smart self-service technologies, wearable technologies, software and systems such as machine learning (ML), generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, and the metaverse are increasingly adopted in a wide range of customer-facing service settings. The shift toward robot-and AI-powered services...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing businesses and daily life, with AI-powered technologies like personal assistants and medical diagnostic systems transforming how we interact and make decisions. However, the ethical implications of these technologies cannot be ignored. AI systems can produce biased results and decisions if not designe...

This book is the Chinese adaptation and translation of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, 9th edition

This book is the Indian low price edition of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy

Purpose Despite all the recent achievements in the field of interactive marketing and artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider the ethical implications of these technologies. This paper explains the concept of corporate digital responsibility (CDR) and how it is affected by new advances in AI. Design/methodology/approach The autho...

Recent research has shown that the trade-off between customer satisfaction and productivity can be mitigated through three strategic pathways: the (1) operations management (OM) approach, (2) focused service factory, and (3) dual culture strategy, which allow firms to achieve cost-effective service excellence (CESE). We advance that these strategie...

This book is the Indonesian edition of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy.

Service robots, generative AI, and intelligent automation will disrupt virtually all service markets. In this 63 min master class video I share my predictions of which types of services will be affected most and implications for service strategy. Spoiler - many markets will go through a rapid consolidation and most providers will go out of business...

This book is the Vietnamese edition of the Strategic Services Marketing sections of the 9th edition of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy by Jochen Wirtz and Christopher Lovelock

This book is the Vietnamese edition of the Operational Services Marketing sections of the 9th edition of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy by Jochen Wirtz and Christopher Lovelock

Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) is an emergent research area in the service domain. We used this relatively new literature domain as context to explore the capability of LLM (Large Language Model)-enabled Artificial Intelligence (AI) service offerings in identifying CDR concepts and in expanding the current scope of academic knowledge in thi...

Recent research has shown that the trade-off between customer satisfaction and productivity can be mitigated through three strategic pathways: the (1) operations management (OM) approach, (2) focused service factory, and (3) dual culture strategy, which allow firms to achieve cost-effective service excellence (CESE). We advance that these strategie...

Call for Papers - The topic of Corporate Digital Responsibility: Understanding and Mitigating the Challenges of AI, Algorithms and Intelligent Automation is relevant for several reasons. Firstly, with the increasing reliance on AI and automation in various industries and sectors, it is crucial to understand and address the ethical and social implic...

With growing investment into the metaverse or metaverses, the required hardware and software is becoming more powerful and cheaper, and tech firms' expectations for this market are high. In parallel, consumer brands are claiming their digital real estate as consumers seek experiences beyond those available in the real world. Having people engage on...

My take on the future of ChatGPT in education - I believe that it is a powerful tool we should use to teach our students to be better at analyzing and dissecting problems and crafting solutions. Watch this 3-min video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbTMANzYCSs

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistin- guishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts...

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts f...

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts f...

Consumer research on conversational agents (CAs) has been growing. To illustrate and map out research in this field, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of published work indexed in the Clarivate Web of Science and Elsevier Scopus databases. Four dominant topical areas were identified through bibliographic coupling. They are 1) consum...

Purpose – This work consists of a critical reflection on the extent to which hospitality and tourism management scholars have accurately used the term ‘analytics’ and its five types (i.e., descriptive, exploratory, predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive analytics) in their research. Only cognitive analytics, the latest and most advanced type, is b...

International Marketing Perspectives on Digital Platforms and Ecosystems -- Special issue call for papers from International Marketing Review -- Guest editors: Timo Mandler, Jun Luo, Natalia Yannopoulou, Jochen Wirtz

The digital service revolution offers unprecedented value-generating opportunities for service stakeholders, through the digitization, automation and transformation of service offerings. As digital service technologies become increasingly sophisticated and intrusive to the lives of consumers, the likelihood of misuse and exploitation of data or ser...

In marketing, it is important to understand why customers behave the way they do. There is an interplay of factors that affect customer behavior during the service encounter. Without this understanding, no firm can hope to create and deliver services that will result in satisfied customers who will buy again.

Loyalty in a business context is a customer’s willingness to patronize a firm over the long run, preferably on an exclusive basis, and recommend the products and services to others. Customer loyalty extends beyond purchasing behavior and includes preference, liking and future intentions. To increase profitability, service firms can build and mainta...

The consumption of luxury services differs from other service consumption and reflects the specificities of the luxury sector and its differences to ordinary (i.e., non-luxury) services. Luxury services are defined as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive. Exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature. Luxuriousness is jo...

The industrial revolution started in the late eighteenth century and automated blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, thereby providing massive structural benefits to our societies. It rapidly increased our standard of living by bringing high-quality, low-cost manufactured goods to the masses and relieved people from laborious manual work. Today, our e...

The effective use of productive capacity is imperative for limited capacity services facing wide demand swings as excess capacity cannot be kept aside for sale at a later date. Hence, staff, labor, equipment and facilities should be utilized as productively as possible. Service marketers, working in collaboration with operations and human resource...

NUS Executive Education Program: Transforming Customer Experience: Strategies for Service Industry I am delighted that the 4th run of my online course will start in March 2023. Many former students asked if my course is available for their teams; now we offer the key takeaways from my EMBA course in a succinct format. For the introduction video...

Purpose The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper...

Published in IMI Konnect; ISSN 2321 9378. The application of artificial intelligence (AI), service robots and digitisation entail significant ethical, privacy and fairness risks. We show that corporate digital responsibility (CDR) is critical because of rapidly increasing streams of customer data and the expanding omnipresence, opacity and complex...

The initial hype and fanfare from the Meta view of how the metaverse could be brought to life has evolved into an ongoing discussion of not only the metaverse’s impact on users and organisations but also the societal and cultural implications of widespread usage. The potential of consumer interaction with brands within the metaverse has engendered...

Calls for Papers (CfP) for Special Issue on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) to be published in @Organizational Dynamics (OD). OD has a strong applied focus. As such, we aim to publish 10 to 12 insightful articles that introduce CDR-related issues to executives and MBA students. We welcome reviews, qualitative and conceptual papers, and in-de...

This slide deck accompanies the Master Class Video Corporate Digital Responsibility in Service Firms & Their Ecosystems. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfessorJochenWirtz

Fluidity is the ability of a digital platform ecosystem to change form to align with changing consumer preferences and stay relevant in the marketplace. This study advances that three dimensions and their five sub-dimensions determine the fluidity of a digital platform ecosystem. They are the (1) functional dimension with its two subdimensions of p...

The service revolution has started Our economies seem to be facing a turning point in the service sector. Technologies are rapidly becoming smarter and more powerful, and at the same time, they are getting smaller, lighter and cheaper. These include hardware, such as physical robots, drones and wearable technologies, and code and software such as f...

This PPT deck accompanies the following article: Wirtz, Jochen, Werner Kunz, Nicole Hartley, and James Tarbit (2022), “Corporate Digital Responsibility in Service Firms and their Ecosystems”, Journal of Service Research, published online first. As this article will be published open access, anyone may use the article and its accompanying figures an...

Service robots are the beginning of the Service Revolution. Similar to the shift that started in the Industrial Revolution from craftsmen to mass production, we believe an accelerated shift in the service sector towards robot- and AI-delivered services is imminent. The exciting prospect is that many services, including hospitality, healthcare, and...

This special issue seeks to push the boundaries of international marketing research by publishing original work on digital platforms, such as social media platforms (e.g., social networks, content sharing & curation platforms, micro-blogs, discussion forums, consumer review sites), online marketplaces (e.g., B2B platforms, B2C platforms, C2C platfo...

Online Appendix; Abstract of paper: Digitization, artificial intelligence, and service robots carry serious ethical, privacy, and fairness risks. Using the lens of corporate digital responsibility (CDR), we examine these risks and their mitigation in service firms and make five contributions. First, we show that CDR is critical in service contexts...

The tourism industry has adopted AI agents as substitutes for human contact. We examine how tourists respond to AI in hotel service settings during a pandemic. Four studies show that services featuring human interaction is preferred to AI enabled interaction. Moreover, subjective happiness is identified as the underlying causal mechanism that drive...

Explores CDR and the data & technology life cycle and the CDR Calculus.

The industrial revolutions started in the late 18th century and automated blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. It dramatically increased our standard of living by bringing high quality, low cost manufactured goods to the masses. Today, our economies are at turning point similar to the industrial revolution, but this time in the service sector. Techno...

Plain English Summary The ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Munich, and Singapore spark different narratives about entrepreneurship, which indicate what is common, appropriate, and successful in the ecosystem and in turn encourage different kinds of entrepreneurial approaches. We conducted 43 interviews with successful players in Silicon Valley, Munich...

Service robots are gradually replacing humans service providers in numerous industries and their development is profoundly impacting the way in which service is delivered (Bornet et al. 2021; Wirtz et al. 2018). Accordingly, service robots encounters represent a primary research area in service. To date, researcher and practitioners have applied se...

Nonownership value, delivering benefits without transferring the burdens of ownership, is a key pillar of service value propositions. To date, service research and management have put their attention primarily on the value that emerges when clients substitute ownership of assets, like vehicles, facilities or factories, with nonownership services, l...

This study is the first to provide an integrated view on the body of knowledge on artificial intelligence (AI) published in the marketing, consumer research, and psychology literature. By leveraging a systematic literature review (SLR) using a data-driven approach and quantitative methodology (including bibliographic coupling), this study provides...

Despite service robots’ importance in the tourism industry, few studies have investigated human–robot interaction from a reciprocal exchange perspective. This paper applies social exchange theory to the context of human–robot interaction along with relational and psychological states based on two empirical studies with two service robots (i.e., Pep...

The digital service revolution will significantly change the way we do business. A big part of this revolution are service robots in various forms and shapes. In this article, we illustrate the implication of service robots for the service industry. We compare service robots with traditional self-service technologies as well as human service person...

Due to the infusion of artificial intelligence, service robots are on the rise. In this chapter the authors provide examples of how the service industry can benefit from the implementation of robots at the organizational frontline. Thereby, they distinguish service robots from well-established self-service technologies and compare human service rep...

This chapter extends the emerging literature on luxury services (Holmqvist et al. 2020; Wirtz et al. 2020) by developing the key concepts of hedonic escapism as well as multifaceted exclusivity. We first developed the role of hedonic escapism in rendering luxury services enjoyable and extraordinary. This represents a key implication for managers of...

Purpose This study aims to show how major service developments in China, India and Singapore offer different perspectives on how cost-effective service excellence (CESE) can be achieved in health care. Resulting research opportunities are highlighted. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on the authors’ in-depth experience in these three...

A professional firm specializing in pension fund audits seeks to extend the firm’s relationships with existing clients in the Philippines by offering consulting services. But the first attempt at cross-selling is a flop. What has gone wrong and why?

Chapter 12 focuses on achieving profitability through creating relationships with customers from the right segments, and then finding ways to build and reinforce their loyalty using the Wheel of Loyalty as an organizing framework. This chapter closes with a discussion of customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

On August 13, 2020, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi explained that Uber is backing Proposition 22 that would exempt it from Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that would require Uber to treat its drivers as employees with benefits effectively on January 1, 2020. To win over California voters, Uber and Lyft were considering to shut down their servic...

The top management at Aarion Bank was pushing for a rapid digital transformation. That included customer service with the aim of moving almost all routine transactions, services, and enquiries to cost-effective but high quality, cutting-edge digital delivery channels. These included smart AI-powered self-service technologies and service robots. Nik...

The general view is that platforms are somehow in the-winner-takes-it-all markets and therefore justify enormous valuations, especially when compared with their pipeline counterparts. However, to continue its fast growth, Airbnb diverted from its pure peer-to-peer (P2P) strategy and has been adding owned room capacity. At the same time, Marriott ad...

The world of luxury is undergoing rapid changes as many classic luxury brands embark on markedly different strategies to deal with an increasingly digital economy. Some luxury brands such as Chanel and Bottega Veneta have deliberately chosen to minimize the impact of digitization and instead focus even more heavily on the traditional service encoun...

The National Library Board (NLB) Singapore is a statutory board that managed to become a serial innovator. Its globally leading innovations in the library context include shelf-reading robots, and even entirely self-service libraries. NLB's consistent focus on excellent service delivery reinforced its commitment to innovation. Key levers were effec...

Teaching Case: In the course of a single day, a busy young woman makes use of a wide array of services.

The Royal Dining membership program is highly popular with diners and generates significant revenues. However, it might be displacing regular, full-price paying customers and could have a negative effect on the painstakingly built and maintained high-end luxury image of the Hong Kong Grand Hotel. In addition, quite a few managers and servers expres...

Problems arise when a large bank, attempting to develop a stronger customer service orientation, enlarges the customer service representatives’ responsibilities to include selling activities.

LUX* was a successful hospitality group operating in the Indian Ocean as well as other locations. In its previous incarnation, the company suffered from poor financial performance, poor service quality, and a weak brand. A change in the leadership of the company led the group through a transformation, which showed positive results within 12 months....

A Philippine fast food company has achieved market dominance in three segments in its home country — burgers and chicken, pizzas, and Chinese food — beating out well-known international competitors such as McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. What is the secret to its domestic success and what are the lessons for its international ventures?

Chapter 1 highlights the importance of services in our economies. We also define the nature of services and how they create value for customers without transfer of ownership. The chapter highlights some distinctive challenges involved in marketing services and introduces the 7 Ps of services marketing. The framework shown in Figure I on the facin...

Chapter 2 provides a foundation for understanding consumer needs and behaviors related to services. The chapter is organized around the three-stage model of service consumption. This model explores how customers search for and evaluate alternative services, make purchase decisions, experience and respond to service encounters, evaluate service perf...

Chapter 3 discusses how to develop a customer-driven services marketing strategy and how a value proposition should be positioned in a way that creates competitive advantage for the firm. This chapter first links the customer, competitor, and company (commonly referred to as “3 Cs”) analysis to a firm’s positioning strategy. The core of the chapter...

Chapter 4 discusses what exactly is a service product, its benefits, components, and the Flower of Service model. A service concept includes both the core and supplementary elements. The supplementary elements both facilitate and enhance the core service offering. This chapter also covers branding, tiered service products, and explains how service...

Chapter 5 examines the time and place elements. Manufacturers usually require physical distribution channels to move their products. However, some service businesses are able to use electronic channels to deliver all (or at least some) of their service elements. For the services delivered in real time with customers physically present, speed and co...