Nicklas Salomonson

• PhD
• Professor at University of Borås

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This research-based handbook provides an understanding about the experiences that vulnerable travellers have when they use demand responsive transport (DRT) modes. It deals with issues of importance when conducting this form of service: ways to interact with travellers, being sensitive to their needs and adapt to situations in the...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the relationship between frontline employees' service orientation, negative emotions and handling strategies during situations of customer incivility involving phubbing. In such situations, the logic and the practical implications of service orientation are challenged. Drawing on a survey of 2,940...

Samhället ska säkerställa att personer med funktionsnedsättning får tillgång till transporter på lika villkor som andra. I detta kapitel jämförs personer med omfattande funktionsnedsättning och den övriga befolkningen i två Västsvenska kommuner (Göteborg och Kungsbacka) avseende hur ofta de använder kollektivtrafik och deras attityder till den. Sam...

Research on how vulnerable consumers navigate various marketplaces and service interactions, developing specific consumer skills in order to empower themselves during such exchanges, has received inadequate attention. This paper contributes to this area by empirically drawing on a multi-perspective go-along travel study, consisting of a combination...

This article aims at advancing research on value creation in service marketing by applying theories of turn-taking and multimodality. It is argued that there is a need to uncover what is inherent in the prefix ‘co’ in value co-creation and that focus needs to be broadened, from perception of value to the production of value, that is, the specific r...

The interaction between customer and provider is a crucial locus for marketing. Essentially, it is in the interplay between these actors where value is created or destroyed for the beneficiary—i.e. primarily for the customer but also for the provider. The way in which this interplay is performed will determine the outcome. This notion is recognized...

Regionpolitik tycks oftast vara osynlig och regionens politiska organisation ogenomtränglig. Kommunikationsvägarna mellan regionens politiker och tjänstemän och regionens medborgare är otydliga och skapar distans mellan regionpolitiker och medborgare. Då det upplevs som alltför svårt att utkräva ansvar från regionens politiker försvagas medborgares...

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The purpose of this paper is to explore expectations among front-line employees regarding their customers and how these expectations can be understood in relation to strategies of customer participation and value co-creation. Two categories of expectations are identified; operative and interactive. In particular, the operative expectations reveal a...

This paper explores in-depth what frontline employees actually do when they co-create value in relation to customers. Analyses of data (1 469 short narratives, questionnaire responses, and instances of critical incidents) collected from surveys and interviews in public transport, are used to identify distinct styles of value co-creation. Building o...

Service research has long stressed the pivotal importance of service oriented front line employees that are attentive and responsive to customers’ needs and that go out of their way to solve customer problems and provide excellent service. This research however presumes a fundamentally positive customer relation where customer demands are construct...

The accelerated pace of consumption in the Western world has led to an increase in clothing and textiles disposed of in the garbage rather than being reused or recycled. The purpose of this article is to increase understanding of how clothing and textile consumption can become more sustainable by demonstrating how members of a network view and deal...

Purpose: The paper explores negative customer interactions in retail from a front line employee perspective. It particularly focuses on how such incidents are defined and perceived against a backdrop of service work. Methodology: The paper draws on 35 in-depth interviews with front line staff in three retail industries (groceries, consumer electro...

Public transport is facing escalating problems with passengers who behave badly by threatening and assaulting both staff and other passengers. Troublesome customers are known to affect employees' health and work motivation adversely. However, employees also form strategies for handling the incidents that arise. Developing successful ways of dealing...

Purpose – IT service management (ITSM) is a discipline for management and maintenance of IT-systems and is claimed to play a critical role in supporting and satisfying business requirements. However, from a customer perspective, ITSM is considered as being costly and the outcome is not always satisfactory. Measurements used to monitor and evaluate...

Purpose - IT Service Management (ITSM) is a discipline for management and maintenance of IT-systems and is claimed to play a critical role in supporting and satisfying business requirements. However, from a customer perspective, ITSM is considered as being costly and the outcome is not always satisfactory. Measurements used to monitor and evaluate...

Purpose Customer misbehaviour, i.e. behaviour within the exchange setting that deliberately violates the generally accepted norms of conduct in such settings pose a problem for service organizations in several ways. Hitherto much research on customer misbehaviour has focused on psychological explanations and individual characteristics. This study b...

An increasing number of companies are introducing artificial agents as self-service tools on their websites, often motivated by the need to provide cost-efficient interaction solutions. These agents are designed to help customers and clients to conduct their business on the website. Their role on commercial websites is often to act as online sales/...

Much current research fails to provide in-depth explanations as to how and with what resources frontline employees deal with incidents where customers display dysfunctional behaviour. By drawing on theory of implicit knowledge and practical judgement this paper aims to explain this and conceptualize inherent structures and sub-mechanisms, central t...

Although interaction has been acknowledged as central in value creation there is still a lack of empirical studies on how value creation is accomplished in practice, and in particular how communicative skills support customers' value creation. The purpose of this paper is therefore to generate a deeper understanding of how customer service represen...

A service encounter is conceived as an interactive process between a service provider and a service receiver. It has however largely been analyzed as a non-interactive phenomenon which leads to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the dynamics of service encounters as an interactive process. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether...

1. Nordic retail research: An introduction Johan Hagberg, Ulrika Holmberg, Malin Sundström, and Lars Walter 2. “You have to eat French fries and béarnaise sauce otherwise life is over!” Consumers’ dilemmas concerning food choices Maria Frostling-Henningsson, Martin Hedbom, and Ludvig Thuresson 3. Grocery shopping behaviour and experiences of elderl...

För att komma till rätta med miljöproblemet att konsumenter idag slänger kläder och textil i soporna behövs gemensamma ansträngningar av olika aktörer som på olika sätt är involverade i konsumenters köp och avyttring av kläder. Det är bakgrunden till att Nätverket för återanvändning och återvinning av kläder och textil (nåå) bildades i januari 2011...

A major environmental problem in Sweden is the fact that clothes are disposed of in the garbage rather than being reused or recycled. A study (Carlsson et al. 2011) indicates that 8 kg textiles are disposed of in the garbage per individual and year. Another study (Gustafsson and Ekström 2012) shows that 62 percent of the Swedes dispose usable cloth...

The consumption of clothes is high and steadily increasing. The garment industry’s resource-intensive manufacturing and consumers’ use and disposal of clothes therefore constitute an increasing environmental problem. The negative impact that consumption of clothes has on the environment makes it important to further investigate consumers’ acquisiti...

Alla känner vi nog igen situationen. Vi står där med en köpt vara eller tjänst som inte håller måttet och är besvikna eller arga. Men, hur agerar vi då? Går vi vidare och klagar eller ger vi upp och förtränger alltihop? Hur benägna är vi egentligen att kräva rättelse? Och vilka slutsatser drar vi efter ett misslyckat köp? Kanske bestämmer vi oss fö...

The customer has become an organizational imperative, a “sovereign ruler” and orienting both organizational activities and individual subjectivities towards customer needs is therefore not merely a desirable ideal, but in many cases also an explicit norm. There are however few studies that directly address the more fundamental consequences of this...

The phenomenon of customer misbehavior, i.e. deviant, threatening or even violent customers, is not unusual and it causes problems for the firm, its employees, and other customers. Hitherto much research has focused on the hospitality industry (e.g. restaurants, hotels and bars) where misbehavior often is explained by service failures or customers’...

Konsumenters agerande vid missnöje med varor och tjänster En kartläggning av hur konsumenter agerar då det uppstår problem eller tvister i samband med köp, vart de söker information och vart konsumenten vänder sig för att få hjälp

This paper follows along the lines of Ford et al. (2008) with the purpose of analysing business interaction. It focuses on dyadic micro interactions between companies' representatives in a business to business context. The paper draws upon a study of customer service personnel and their interaction with customers by telephone in an industrial setti...

Studies indicate that today in Sweden there are about 200 000 persons who suffer from some form of cognitive function disorder. It is a very mixed group with different needs but there are also several common denominators. An impaired cognitive ability can manifest itself as problems in taking initiatives, planning, and organising a structure in lif...

The debate in society on climate changes and global warming has become appreciable. Much of this debate revolves around the issue of policy making, regulations and international agreement. Too little attention is however put upon what do energy users say and how they act in relation to their consumption of energy. In this paper we explore boundarie...

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to analyse service encounters between citizens and a virtual servant called Elin on a municipality's website in Sweden and contribute to an understanding of this kind of encounters. Design/methodology/approach -The empirical material consists of registered interactions (back-log) between citizens and the virtua...

Nowadays customers are often offered the possibility to interact with companies through a mix of self-service technology (SST) and inter-personal contacts. Demands of both cost-effectiveness and good relationships with customers trigger the need to find a balance between these ways to interact. The purpose of this paper is to identify requirements...

The deregulation of the energy sector has led to a need to study service encounters between energy companies and customers. Due to that a continuous development of energy companies' services will be even more important in the future this paper reports upon key values of energy customers of today and tomorrow. Based on the characteristics of the MeW...

Föreliggande rapport utgör slutrapporten i projektet ”Kundmöte 2015” som bedrivits mellan maj 2007 och maj 2008. Syftet med projektet har varit att undersöka och analysera hur servicemöten mellan kunder och Göteborg Energi (GE) år 2015 kan komma att gestalta sig. Resultatet skall utgöra en grund för att GE skall kunna välja strategi och arbetssätt...

A service encounter is conceived as an interactive process between a service provider and a service receiver. It has however largely been analyzed as a non-interactive phenomenon which lead to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the dynamics of service encounters as an interactive process. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether p...

Many models for characterizing and evaluating e-services emphasise different levels of complexity and maturity of e-services. These frameworks takes as their starting point an organisational point of view on e-services where it seems that integration between different public authorities is the ultimate goal. An unresolved quest is however to judge...

In today's business there is a legible need to find innovative procedures regarding product- or service development where several stakeholders meet in the same arena. An unresolved quest, however, is how such an arena could be set up and which activities to perform. This paper describes experiences from establishing such an arena, called an Interne...

Organizations do not exist for their own sake. Organizations deliver something for somebody. In contemporary research about perspectives and methods for business processes management the performance of value-adding activities for customers has been stressed. The question however is whether such approach is enough. Isn’t there a need to a larger ext...

There are an ever increasing number of occasions and ways customers and companies interact. Different media, such as telephone conversations between people and interaction facilitated by IT-systems, is used for such purpose. An important quest is to determine in which actions, in the business interaction, IT is appropriate to use. In this paper rec...

Telefax +46(0)33 435 40 07 1 Nicklas.Salomonson@hb.se, Phone +46(0)33 435 44 79 2 Mikael.Lind@hb.se, Phone +46(0)33 435 40 97 (Both authors have contributed equivalently to this paper) ABSTRACT Communication between suppliers and customers often needs to be handled by the use of different media. It is a challenge to determine which media to use for...

Internet-based interfaces between organisations and their buyers are becoming increas- ingly common. Lately virtual servants have been identified as agents to support the customer - supplier interaction. In this paper we investigate the existence of one such virtual servant - Anna at IKEA.com - in a business interaction situation. Anna is regarded...

A point of departure for this study is that industrial companies are changing the ways in which they communicate with customers. The introduction of Internet-based systems or outsourcing customer service to call centres are examples of this. Customer service representatives are often the focus of this change. When technological systems replace thei...