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...

This 9 min podcast explains our latest article on B2B CXM. Here, we identify three universal CXM value propositions. These are: (1) Relieving CX to promote organizational efficiency and individual convenience; (2) Enabling CX to facilitate organizational differentiation and individual empowerment; and (3) Enriching CX to foster organizational assoc...

The business-to-business (B2B) customer experience (CX) literature tends to promote a one-size-fits-all approach, advocating the undifferentiated goal of exceptional CX with the view that 'more is better' in CX management (CXM). In contrast, we identify three universal customer goal categories and their associated CXM value propositions that underp...

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...

This special issue of the International Marketing Review sets sail to explore uncharted waters at the interface of digital and international marketing. It includes conceptual and empirical contributions by 40 scholars from 10 countries across the globe. Their work can be divided into three distinct groups, i.e., (1) studies examining the internatio...

Quadria Capital Investment Management Private Limited (Quadria Capital) was committed to its mission of using its expertise to do well by doing good through bringing affordable quality health care to Asia. In July 2013, it found such an investment opportunity in the Asian Institute of Gastroenterology (AIG) Hospital in India. AIG was one of the lar...

Purpose Since its inception, ChatGPT has been disruptively transforming how businesses operate along the whole value chain. The service sector is no exception from these technological advances. Given its potential and significance, five major areas whereby ChatGPT has great potential in services management are identified and discussed in terms of o...

Few researchers sought to identify the most popular themes of study that promote ethical leadership in service organizations. This paper addresses this knowledge gap in the academic literature. Its research objectives are threefold: (i) Firstly, it identifies and extracts high impact articles on service ethics published in the last five years; (ii)...

Interview with Singapore Airlines’ CEO Goh Choon Phong on SIA's Strategy & Future. ---> PART I: Three Pillars of SIA’s Brand Promise. ---> PART II: How Can SIA Maintain Its Competitive Edge? ---> PART III: Cost-Effective Service Excellence at SIA. ---> PART IV: What Is SIA's Commitment to Net Zero Carbon Emissions? ---> PART V: SIA’s Strategic Outl...

Purpose – Since its inception, ChatGPT has been disruptively transforming how businesses operate along the whole value chain. The service sector is no exception from these technological advances. Given its potential and significance, five major areas whereby ChatGPT has great potential in services management are identified and discussed in terms of...

Uncomfortable service interactions are ubiquitous in tourism and hospitality settings (e.g., returning a dish in a restaurant, ordering room service late at night, and complaining about noisy others in a hotel). Across five experimental studies, we show that service robots reduce consumers' metaperception processing and as a consequence can mitigat...

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...

Purpose An AI concierge is a technologically advanced, intelligent and personalized assistant that is designated to an individual customer, proactively taking care of that customer’s needs throughout the service journey. This article envisions the idea of AI concierges and discusses how to leverage AI concierges in the customer journey. Design/met...

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...

Digital transformation has had an unprecedented influence on all sectors of business over the last decade. We are now entering an era characterized by the extensive digital transformation of businesses, society, and consumers. Therefore, digital transformation has become a pivotal focus for organizations across various sectors in recent years. Desp...

Digital transformation has had an unprecedented influence on all sectors of business over the last decade. We are now entering an era characterized by the extensive digital transformation of businesses, society, and consumers. Therefore, digital transformation has become a pivotal focus for organizations across various sectors in recent years. Desp...

This chapter illustrates the new service reality induced by innovative technology. For this, we highlight the difference between older automated self-service technologies and service robots. Further, we analyze the difference between human service employees and service robots and show avenues for collaboration and specialization in the Service Robo...

This book is the Japanese adaptation of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy. The book can be bought from the publisher, Amazon, and leading bookstores. See https://www.maruzen-publishing.co.jp/item/b305495.html

This book is the Saudi Arabian adaptation of the 9th edition of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy by Jochen Wirtz and Christopher Lovelock. The book is designed for students in Saudi Arabia as well as in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

This book is the Korean translation of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, 9th edition.

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...

Few researchers sought to identify the most popular themes of study that promote ethical leadership in service organizations. This paper addresses this knowledge gap in the academic literature. Its research objectives are threefold: (i) first, it identifies and extracts high impact articles on service ethics published in the last 5 years; (ii) seco...

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...

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...

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...

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...