Thoughts from Kay Lemon, 2015 Lovelock Award Recipient
Katherine (Kay) Lemon is the Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute. At Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, Kay holds the Accenture Professorship and is Professor of Marketing.
It is such an exciting time in service research. Scholars and organizations are seeking solutions to significant challenges and big problems. To get a sense of the big picture, I took a new look at two publications that highlight priorities for academic research:
(1) the most recent Marketing Science Institute Research Priorities (MSI 2014) and
(2) the recently published Journal of Service Research article focusing on service research priorities (Ostrom et al. 2015).
It was quite energizing to see the synergies between key challenges faced by MSI member companies (many of whom are service businesses) and issues identified as critical challenges for service. Of course, for the five issues I identify below, I’ve described my own personal view of these issues – you may identify different synergies or see them differently. I hope that perhaps you’ll find something really energizing in one or more of these topic areas, and begin to work in one of these “big” challenge areas.
Big Challenges that Represent Significant Research Opportunities in Service:
- Understanding and managing the customer experience. There is a critical need for additional research to understand the entire customer experience. Customer experiences are dynamic, complex, and embedded in larger service eco-systems. They result in massive amounts of data across all touchpoints in the entire customer journey, across channels, offerings, platforms and devices, incorporating collaboration with other customers and partners, and across time and space as well. There is a true need for research to examine and understand the full customer experience – beyond the path to purchase through consumption and potentially to the long-term effects of customer experience on health and well-being.
- Service design and customer experience design. There are significant opportunities to integrate and leverage insights from design science, architecture, information systems, biology, engineering and many other fields to enhance the processes by which we design service and design experiences. How can we help consumers (and customers) get their “jobs done” smoothly, with less friction, and maybe even with more joy. The role of emotions in service and experience design is a particularly greenfield area.
- Big data for key insights. The explosion in data has led to a critical need for new models and approaches to analyze, visualize, interpret and present this huge amount of data in a way that leads to usable insights that result in improved value for both the customer and the firm. This is a vast area for future research; we need better predictive analytics, scalable methods, simpler ways to gain insights from unstructured data, easily understandable data visualization techniques, and easily implementable monitoring approaches, metrics and dashboards. These new models and methods may enable dynamic and real-time design, access, personalization and response.
- Leveraging technology. We are just at the beginning of so many new technological opportunities in service – there are great opportunities to understand how mobile technologies, location-based technologies, and emerging advances (in areas such as 3D printing, virtual reality, drones, neuroscience, and who knows what is next) will change consumer behavior, change the way organizations are organized, and change the role of human resources in the marketplace. The way people experience service is being transformed. I think one key unexplored question is how these new technologies are changing how consumers think, feel, and act, and how they co-create and react to service experiences.
- Making the world a better place. Both sets of priorities identify exciting areas for research focused on improving well-being and establishing optimal social contracts with customers. Deeper insights into developing markets and serving people at the base of the pyramid are critically needed. In addition, building upon the discussion above, research is needed to identify key enablers and inhibitors of designing and executing sustainable services and experiences, and learning how technology-enabled services may be useful to improve health and well-being.
- The role of humans. Finally, considering all of the issues noted above, there is an opportunity to research the role of creativity and the “human component.” Much of the pioneering work on the human side of business has come out of service research. As we continue to extend our reliance on technology, and as we see the “dehumanization” of some aspects of service, new research is needed to understand the key roles people play in the service domain, and new roles that emerge as a result of technological reliance.
These are some areas that I see as really promising for future research. Dig in! Let the hard work begin! Please feel free to comment or to contact me if you see things differently, or have other ideas you’d like to share.
Kay Lemon
Further reading:
- Marketing Science Institute (2014), “MSI 2014-2016 Research Priorities,” Cambridge, MA: Marketing Science Institute, www.msi.org.
- Ostrom, Amy L, A. Parasuraman, David E. Bowen, Lia Patricio and Christopher A. Voss (2015), “Service Research Priorities in a Rapidly Changing Context,” Journal of Service Research, 18 (2), 127-159.
