Special Issue – Service Science
Co-creating the Customer Service Experience with High Tech and High Touch
Co-Editors:
Mark M. Davis, Bentley University; David Ding, University of Houston
Deadline for Submissions:
November 15, 2015
Focus of Special Issue:
In today’s highly competitive environment, there is a growing need to provide customers with a truly memorable experience to increase both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Customer experience has been operationalized in different ways, such as “memorable events” (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) or clues that customers can see, smell, taste, hear, or perceive while interacting with service systems (Berry & Carbone, 2007). Today, a customer’s experience resulting from the interaction with a service provider requires a combination of high tech and high touch, depending on the type of service and therefore is generally heterogeneous. For instance, an experience at a Disney theme park is largely different from an experience at an Apple or Microsoft store.
This special issue will focus on research that addresses how to enhance the customer service experience. Though many approaches are possible, we expect research in this area will often require a transdisciplinary approach that includes operations, marketing, technology and human resources, among other disciplines. We seek high-quality manuscripts that contribute to conceptual, empirical, and analytical insights of the customer experience. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Frameworks for managing the customer experience
- Models of customer experience
- Customer experience in specific service industries
- Relationships between customer experience and service excellence
- Service provider-customer relationship through the service experience
- Factors driving customer experience
- Service innovation with customer experience
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: November 15, 2015
- Expected Publication date: September 2016
All submissions must be made through the Service Science submission portal at
http://pubsonline.informs.org/page/serv/submission-guidelines.
All manuscripts must follow INFORMS publication requirements and will go through a double-blind peer review.
Questions about this special issue can be addressed to co-editors:
- Mark Davis (mdavis@bentley.edu)
- David Ding (xding@uh.edu)
References:
Berry, Leonard L., and Lewis P. Carbone (2007), “Build Loyalty Through Experience Management,” Quality Progress, September, pp. 27-32.
Pine, B. Joseph, II, and James H. Gilmore (1999), “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 76. No. 4, July-August, pp. 97-105
