SHOULD WE DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN BUSINESS AND PRIVATE CUSTOMERS?

The literature on how customers make their service-provider choices largely distinguishes between private and business customers, and companies’ offerings have been separated accordingly. This study takes a closer look at the possible differences between these two customer categories. The results are explorative and based on both qualitative and quantitative studies focusing on customers’ actual behavior. The findings show that it is not only job-related aspects such as “being able to work” that influence business travel, and that private matters such as “time with the family” are clearly of equal significance in the choice situation. Price perception is important, but only when it is set against the appropriate social costs. The contradiction appears in the airlines’ offers to these customers, which are generally specifically job related. The results of the present study show that most business customers are, in fact, “private customers”.air travel, customer relationships, business-to-business relationships, preferences, choice, service

Explaining how Platforms Foster Innovation in Service Ecosystems

Service innovation research has extended the study of service ecosystems to the role of platforms to foster service innovations, thus creating a sustainable advantage in competitive markets. Making creative and effective use of these innovation platforms requires a better understanding of how key actors foster service innovation by engaging with multiple actors, understanding dynamic structures and managing the innovation process. This article explains how firms configure and exploit innovation platforms to foster service innovations. Drawing on agency-driven and structure-driven concepts, the framework developed in this paper, links the innovation platform to the service platform. Constituted by shared structures, including norms, standards, and rules together with value co-creation logic, the service platform functions as the institutionalized site of resource integration and value co-creation processes. The usefulness of this framework is shown by describing how six firms use three categories of a platform to pursue innovation

Customer experiences in crisis situations: An agency-structure perspective

In times of crisis, interactions and structures can change, eradicating prevailing norms and rules, with enduring unfavorable effects, and existing conceptual frameworks may fail to explain the effects of radical contextual change. In such contexts, the meaning of the customer experience is also likely to change, and touchpoints, cues, and the concept of the customer journey may prove insufficient to theorize the formation of those experiences. Adopting an agency-structure perspective, the article explores how crisis disrupts and alters structuration modalities, including space-time perception, access to resources, and institutional arrangements. To conceptualize how these contextual changes affect customer experience, we contend that it is necessary to understand the complex set of interactions among multiple actors and the structures and modalities that together shape the customer experience. Drawing on structuration theories to elucidate how disruptive contexts and crisis modalities affect the customer experience, the proposed conceptual framework identifies crisis modalities (discontinuities, accessibility, and fragmentability) that explain customer experiences in disruptive contexts as meaningful patterns of interaction informed by structure and agency. These findings can help firms to understand and manage customer experiences in disruptive contexts. In conclusion, we discuss how future research might contextualize and test the proposed framework.publishedVersio

How platforms foster service innovations

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How firms configure and deploy innovation platforms to foster service innovations

Service innovation research has extended the study of service ecosystems to embrace the role of platforms, thus creating a sustainable advantage in competitive markets. Making creative and effective use of innovation platforms requires a better understanding of how key actors foster service innovation by engaging with multiple actors, understanding dynamic structures and managing the innovation process. This article explains how firms configure and use innovation platforms to foster service innovations. Drawing on agency-driven and structure-driven concepts, the framework developed in this paper, links the innovation platform to renew ongoing business. Constituted by shared structures, including norms, standards, and rules together with value co-creation logics, the innovation platform functions as the institutionalized site focused on innovative resource integration and value co-creation processes. The usefulness of the framework is shown by describing how six firms use three categories of a platform to pursue innovation.publishedVersio

Customer Needing: A Challenge for the Seller Offering

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Moving Toward Collaborative Service Recovery A Multiactor Orientation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You are free to download this work and share with others, but cannot change in any way or use commercially without permission, and you must attribute this work as “Service Science. Copyright © 2019 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2019.0241, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.”Service recovery research has traditionally been firm-centric, focusing primarily on the time and effort expended by firms in addressing service failures. The subsequent shift to a customer-centric orientation addressed the customer’s role in recovery situations, and the recent dyadic orientation has explored the effectiveness of their joint efforts. However, earlier conceptualizations failed to take adequate account of the complexity of service recovery encounters in which multiple actors collaborate and integrate resources. This study explores how multiactor collaborations influence the customer’s experience of service recovery by adopting a multiactor orientation and by applying service-dominant logic. After reviewing the customer experience literature, a collaborative recovery experience framework is developed that emphasizes the joint efforts of multiple actors and customers to achieve a favorable recovery experience. In a contextualization, the usefulness of the new framework to explain customer experiences in collaborative service processes is shown. Finally, further research avenues are proposed.publishedVersio

Expanding understanding of service exchange and value co-creation: a social construction approach

According to service-dominant logic (S-D logic), all providers are service providers, and service is the fundamental basis of exchange. Value is co-created with customers and assessed on the basis of value-in-context. However, the extensive literature on S-D logic could benefit from paying explicit attention to the fact that both service exchange and value co-creation are influenced by social forces. The aim of this study is to expand understanding of service exchange and value co-creation by complementing these central aspects of S-D logic with key concepts from social construction theories (social structures, social systems, roles, positions, interactions, and reproduction of social structures). The study develops and describes a new framework for understanding how the concepts of service exchange and value co-creation are affected by recognizing that they are embedded in social systems. The study contends that value should be understood as value-in-social-context and that value is a social construction. Value co-creation is shaped by social forces, is reproduced in social structures, and can be asymmetric for the actors involved. Service exchanges are dynamic, and actors learn and change their roles within dynamic service systems

A new conceptualization of service innovation grounded in S-D logic and service systems

Fagfellevurdert artikkel, publisert i International Journal of Quality & Service Sciences, DOI: 10.1108/17566691311316220Engelsk sammendrag (abstract): Purpose—This article conceptualizes service innovation through a service-dominant logic (S-D logic) lens and with a service system foundation. Design/methodology/approach—This conceptual approach entails not only the service-dominant logic but also structuration theory to emphasize the actor’s perspective on service innovation. Because the value of innovation unfolds in practice, this study denotes customers as the key actors in value co-creation in context. Findings—A resource constellation gets reconfigured in a service system, which explains service innovation from an S-D logic perspective and highlights customers’ value co-creation in practice. The focus is on the interdependencies among the configuration of resources in a service system and schemas that shape customers and other actors as they integrate resources and co-create value. Research limitations/implications—By discussing service innovation in a structuration view, it would be possible to gain a better understanding of the guiding principles or schemas that enable actors to co-create value. Originality/value—Service innovation derives from changes in either resources or schemas (norms and rules) or some a combination thereof, and it results in structural changes to the service system. This conceptualization provides (a) a new definition of service innovation, (b) a new framework to describe the interdependency among change resources and schemas as a basis for an innovative configuration or reconfiguration of a service system, and (c) three propositions that illustrate the relevance of the new framework

Institutional logics matter when coordinating resource integration

Resource integration has become an important concept in marketing literature. However, little is known about the systemic nature of resource integration and the ways the activities of resource integrators are coordinated and adjusted to each other. Therefore, we claim that institutions are the coordinating link that have impact on value cocreation efforts and are the reference base for customers’ value assessment. When conceptualizing the systemic nature of resource integration, we include the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions and institutional logics. This article provides a framework and a structure for identifying and analyzing the influence of institutional logics on resource integration in service systems