Customer positivity and participation in services: an empirical test in a health care context

Many service interactions require customers to actively participate, yet customers often do not participate at levels that optimize their outcomes, particularly in health care. To gain insight into how customers shape a service experience with highly uncertain outcomes, we construct a model on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The model is used to empirically assess how situation-specific emotions and customer participation during a health care service experience affect perceptions of the service provider. The model is tested using data from 190 medical clinic customers. Consistent with theory, results reveal that as customers’ relative affect levels become more positive, levels of participation increase as well. In turn, higher levels of positivity and participation improve customer perceptions of the quality of the service provider and satisfaction with the co-produced service experience. Implications of this research focus managers on designing services to help clients manage their emotions in ways that facilitate positivity and participation and thus improve service perceptions.     

Do managers know what their customers think and why?

The ability of a firm’s managers to understand how its customers view the firm’s offerings and the drivers of those customer perceptions is fundamental in determining the success of marketing efforts. We investigate the extent to which managers’ perceptions of the levels and drivers of their customers’ satisfaction and loyalty align with that of their actual customers (along with customers’ expectations, quality, value, and complaints). From 70,000 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) customer surveys and 1068 firm (manager) responses from the ACSI-measured companies, our analyses suggest that managers generally fail to understand their firms’ customers in two important ways. First, managers systematically overestimate the levels of customer satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty, as well as the levels of key antecedent constructs such as expectations and perceived value. Second, managers’ understanding of the drivers of their customers’ satisfaction and loyalty are disconnected from those of their actual customers. Among the most significant “disconnects,” managers underestimate the importance of customer perceptions of quality in driving their satisfaction and of satisfaction in driving customers’ loyalty and complaint behavior. Our results indicate that firms must do more to ensure that managers understand how their customers perceive the firm’s products and services and why.     

Critical service logic: making sense of value creation and co-creation

Because extant literature on the service logic of marketing is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation, the roles of both service providers and customers remain analytically unspecified, without a theoretically sound foundation for value creation or co-creation. This article analyzes value creation and co-creation in service by analytically defining the roles of the customer and the firm, as well as the scope, locus, and nature of value and value creation. Value creation refers to customers’ creation of value-in-use; co-creation is a function of interaction. Both the firm’s and the customer’s actions can be categorized by spheres (provider, joint, customer), and their interactions are either direct or indirect, leading to different forms of value creation and co-creation. This conceptualization of value creation spheres extends knowledge about how value-in-use emerges and how value creation can be managed; it also emphasizes the pivotal role of direct interactions for value co-creation opportunities.     

中小商业银行客户贡献度评价及分类研究

以目前已有的客户价值评价模型为基础,对商业银行的企业类客户进行研究,建立其对银行业绩贡献度的评价指标体系,提出客户价值评价模型,对客户消费行为、自身属性等数据进行了挖掘和分析,详细阐述评价方法和过程,并用模糊C-均值聚类方法对客户进行分类,探讨银行对每类客户的营销策略,以期达到保持有价值客户、提升客户层次的目的。实证分析结果表明基于本文提出的对商业银行客户价值的评价方法更为简单、实用,可以为中小商业银行进行客户评价提供决策支持。     

信任式服务的顾客忠诚形成机制及实践启示

信任式服务因其专业性和（或）“纯服务”等鲜明特征而使之显著区别于其他类型的服务,其顾客忠诚形成机制也因此具有独特性。针对医疗服务的实证分析表明：在信任式服务中,顾客信任在顾客忠诚形成机制体中起着关键性的作用,形成“服务质量→顾客信任→感知价值→顾客满意→顾客忠诚”的逻辑链;服务互动质量和结果质量通过顾客信任对顾客感知价值和顾客满意产生影响,进而影响顾客忠诚,但服务环境质量对顾客信任和顾客忠诚没有显著影响。因此,对顾客形成机制的研究需要区分产品和服务的类型以及服务质量的类型。提供信任式服务的组织应该重视并加强对服务人员与顾客互动能力的培养,提升服务人员与顾客的服务互动质量,并切实保障和提高服务结果质量,从而增强顾客信任,提升顾客忠诚。     

Customer betrayal and retaliation: when your best customers become your worst enemies

After a service failure and a poor recovery, what leads loyal customers to try to punish a firm even if there is no material gain for doing so? We propose and test a justice-based model that incorporates perceived betrayal as the means to understand customer retaliation and the “love becomes hate” effect. The results suggest that betrayal is a key motivational force that leads customers to restore fairness by all means possible, including retaliation. In contrast to the majority of findings in the service literature, we propose and find that relationship quality has unfavorable effects on a customer’s response to a service recovery. As a relationship gains in strength, a violation of the fairness norm was found to have a stronger effect on the sense of betrayal experienced by customers. The model was tested on a national sample of airline passengers who complained to a consumer agency after an unsuccessful recovery.     

Overcoming the “recency trap” in customer relationship management

Purchase likelihood typically declines as the length of time since the customer’s previous purchase (“recency”) increases. As a result, firms face a “recency trap,” whereby recency increases for customers who do not purchase in a given period, making it even less likely they will purchase in the next period. Eventually the customer is effectively lost to the firm. We develop and illustrate a modeling approach to target a firm’s marketing efforts, keeping in mind the customer’s recency state. This requires an empirical model that predicts purchase likelihood as a function of recency and marketing, and a dynamic optimization that prescribes the most profitable way to target customers. In our application we find that customers’ purchase likelihoods as well as response to marketing depend on recency. These results are used to show that the targeting of email and direct mail should depend on the customer’s recency and that the optimal decision policy enables the average high recency customer, who currently is virtually worthless to the firm, to become profitable.     

服务逻辑的修正——基于价值创造的观点

采用理论分析和概念构建方法分别分析了基于消费者和基于供应商的服务逻辑以及价值创造，通过对交换价值和使用价值的探讨，首先明确了使用价值是价值创造的基础，顾客才是真正的价值创造者；其次指出企业采用服务逻辑可以参与到顾客价值生成过程当中，企业的市场提供物应该扩展到企业与顾客之间的互动，这样企业才能成为顾客价值的合作创造者；最后，提出了十个服务逻辑命题，以便为营销实践人员提供全新的视角理解顾客价值创造．为服务实践提供理论基础。     

Effects of dominance transitions on advice adherence in professional service conversations

For many professional services, advice adherence is a necessary condition for achieving service success for both customers and service providers. Despite their pivotal roles in value co-creation, typical conversational interactions often lead to low adherence. We propose that enabling a “dominance transition,” from provider dominance in the pre-advice stage to customer dominance in the post-advice stage, enhances advice adherence because it increases customers’ perceived common ground. Furthermore, providers’ consultation focus, customers’ prior knowledge, and customers’ perceived adherence effort moderate this process. Using mixed methods, including both empirical modeling and controlled and field experiments, we validate the proposed model in various contexts (healthcare, financial services, and fitness and wellness counseling). The findings establish several theoretical contributions and offer managerial implications for improving advice adherence by managing dominance transitions in conversational interactions more effectively through training service providers or even programming AI chatbots.

     

服务技术创新与服务忠诚关系模型的创建及应用

从顾客感知的角度探讨服务技术创新的结果表现、效率、易用性、感知控制、便利性和感知风险等特点与服务忠诚的关系,研究表明：服务技术创新的结果表现、效率和易用性与服务质量正相关;便利性对服务忠诚具有直接的正向作用,感知控制与服务质量和感知价值都无显著相关;而顾客的感知风险与服务质量和服务忠诚之间存在负相关;同时也证实了服务质量和感知价值都对服务忠诚具有正向影响的观点。服务企业应积极地进行技术创新,尤其要重视能吸引消费者尝试使用并重复使用的因素,并把监控与减少消费者的风险感知作为吸引消费者使用创新性服务技术并培养其忠诚的重要工作。     

The service quality-satisfaction link revisited: exploring asymmetries and dynamics

This study provides deeper insight in the link between service quality and customer satisfaction. The traditional assumption of a linear relationship is challenged by exploring asymmetries and dynamics. The simultaneous influence of service quality and customer experience on satisfaction is examined by means of nonlinear structural equation modeling. Results show that functional-utilitarian quality attributes (availability, efficiency, fulfillment, and privacy) lose their capability to delight customers as the customer relationship matures. In contrast, hedonic quality attributes (design, enjoyment, and image) only exhibit an increasing effect on satisfaction for more experienced customers. These insights are vital for service managers as they help to improve the efficiency of quality investments.     

Technology-driven service strategy

Advancements in technology are radically transforming service, and increasingly providing the underlying basis for service strategy. In this paper, we develop a typology and positioning map for service strategy, in the context of rapid technological change, and outline the process for firms to position or reposition their service strategies. Which strategy to choose is based on the degree to which customer demand is heterogeneous, and the degree to which potential customer lifetime value varies across customers. This results in four strategies: the McService strategy that is standardized and transactional, the Relational Service strategy that is standardized and relational, the Customized Transaction strategy that is personalized and transactional, and the Adaptive Personalization strategy that is personalized and relational. We provide firms a roadmap for identifying a “sweet spot” strategy in relation to a segment’s realized or potential customer lifetime value, combined with the firm’s technological capabilities. Because technological capabilities inevitably advance, firms will tend to move from standardized to personalized and from transactional to relational over time, implying that firms should be alert to technological opportunities to personalize their relationships with customers. Our strategic framework also produces a useful bridge from marketing practice to the conceptual evolution of the service literature, showing how the historical trends toward continuing customer relationships and co-productive personalization should drive strategic thinking in service.     

The effects of customer participation in co-created service recovery

The benefits of customer co-creation of value in the service context are well recognized. However, little is known about service failures in a co-creation context and the consequent roles of both firms and customers in the advent of service recovery. In conceptualizing a new construct, “customer participation in service recovery,” this study proposes a theoretical framework that delineates the consequences of the construct and empirically tests the proposed framework using role-playing experiments. The results indicate that, when customers participate in the service recovery process in self-service technology contexts, they are more likely to report higher levels of role clarity, perceived value of future co-creation, satisfaction with the service recovery, and intention to co-create value in the future. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. Authors are listed alphabetically.     

百货商店服务体系关键要素的构成研究——基于广州市百货商店的实证分析

百货商店的生存与发展,关键是如何尽善尽美地去满足顾客的服务需求,因此,识别百货商店的服务构成因素至关重要。服务体系的核心内容包括服务组合与服务传递系统。通过对消费者的调查,研究结果显示:消费者最关注的服务关键要素为可靠性、保证性、服务传递、支持性、可信性和体验性。为此,百货商店提高服务质量、强化顾客满意的措施应从服务文化、服务体系、服务流程、商品管理和服务团队等五个方面着手。     

The effects of customer acquisition and retention orientations on a firm’s radical and incremental innovation performance

The effect of a firm’s strategic focus on acquiring new customers and/or retaining existing customers (customer acquisition and retention orientations) on innovation performance is evaluated. With dyadic primary data collected from 225 strategic business units, the authors demonstrate that a firm’s focus on customer acquisition enhances its radical innovation performance but hinders its incremental innovation; a firm’s strategic orientation toward customer retention has the opposite effects. These effects are mediated by both customer knowledge development and the firm’s resource configuration decisions. In addition, the authors provide insight into the impact of managerial decision trade-offs when implementing customer engagement strategies. The results suggest that the effect of customer acquisition and retention orientations on customer knowledge and investment decisions, and ultimately on innovation performance, is amplified when a firm consistently implements a specific engagement strategy. Implementing a dual strategy by attempting to focus on both acquiring and retaining customers undermines resource configuration decisions, with diverse effects on both radical and incremental innovation.     

The impact of a sales team’s perceived entitativity on customer satisfaction

This research investigates the impact of a sales team’s entitativity—the extent to which a group of individuals is perceived as a unified single entity—on customer satisfaction. Four studies demonstrate that a sales team entitativity cue, either based on appearance (e.g., wearing the same outfit) or based on behavior (e.g., explicit coordination in service), leads to heightened perceptions of service quality, which subsequently enhances customer satisfaction. Further, these two entitativity cues are shown to have interactive effects. Specifically, when both cues indicate high entitativity, customer satisfaction with the sales team exceeds the average evaluation of individual team members. However, if at least one cue suggests low entitativity (e.g., different outfits or no explicit coordination), the positive influence of the entitativity cue is undermined and customer satisfaction with the team’s service is mitigated. Product category is identified as an important moderator of the main effect.     

基于顾客感知价值的经济型酒店顾客忠诚驱动因素研究——以西安市经济型酒店为例

以顾客感知价值为研究视角,对经济型酒店顾客忠诚的驱动因素进行分析,构建经济型酒店顾客忠诚驱动模型,强调经济型酒店顾客感知价值对顾客忠诚具有直接决定性的驱动作用,而其驱动则从顾客的感知服务质量、情感价值、会员制、产品价值及获取便利性等5个方面来表现。最后,在以上分析的基础上,对基于顾客感知价值的经济型酒店顾客忠诚的培育提出4点可行性建议：向顾客传递更多的价值;培育忠诚员工;科学管理顾客信息及精心打造品牌。     

基于SD模型的客户服务成本信息不对称影响研究

制造企业经常通过提供高水平的客户服务向顾客传递优质产品质量信号,但由于客户服务成本信息不对称的影响,产品质量信号存在一定程度的失灵,影响了潜在客户对优质产品的购买。文章分析了制造企业客户服务成本不对称信息的原因及其对潜在客户购买行为的影响,通过建立系统动力学模型模拟产品销售过程,研究客户服务成本信息不对称度与企业客户数量之间的关系,结果表明客户服务成本信息不对称度下降有助于企业客户数量的增长,但其影响力有随时间下降的趋势。     

试论营销价值观的五个层次

营销价值观，简单说来即人们对市场营销的意义、作用、效果和重要性的总体评价。营销价值观是市场营销的灵魂。营销价值观及其体系的层次结构由低到高依次为营销产品与服务，营销顾客问题解决方案，营销顾客最大价值，营销顾客成功，营销爱、快乐、幸福。提高营销人的品德和心灵境界是营销价值观提升的核心，树立“爱出者爱返、福往者福来，成就他人就是成就自己”信念，用高层次营销价值观影响顾客、合作伙伴等营销参与者使其高尚起来。