Today we identify service articles published in Marketing, Management, Operations, Productions, Information Systems & Practioner-oriented Journals in the last months.
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Godfrey, D. M. and L. L. Price (2023): How an ethos of repair shapes material sustainability in services, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, (3756), pp.1-24
Environmental sustainability requires market services to care for and respect physical materials, moving beyond a conventional customer-centric focus. This research examines how service providers can incorporate tangible objects and material processes into reparative services, which span many industries and enable material sustainability in market systems. The paper also analyzes how materiality shapes customer perceptions of reparative service processes and outcomes. An interpretive analysis of ethnographic and online review data identifies an ethos of repair shaping service processes, outcomes, and evaluations. Service providers demonstrate an ethos of repair through a sense of material empathy and through a networked understanding of how materials interact before, during, and after service processes. Tensions between the ethos of repair and a pervasive ethos of consumption shape customer evaluations of reparative services. Results have important implications for environmental sustainability. A discussion presents strategic recommendations for making, delivering, and enabling reparative service promises.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00993-9 [Google]
Hochstein, B., C. M. Voorhees, A. B. Pratt, D. Rangarajan, D. M. Nagel and V. Mehrotra (2023): Customer success management, customer health, and retention in B2B industries, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 40(3757), pp.912-932
Customer Success (CS) Management is an emerging B2B marketing strategy. The task of CS management is to increase customer retention through dedicated and ongoing proactive attention to improving the value customers realize from a product or solution. Leveraging a theories-in-use approach, we demonstrate the adoption of CS management across a wide range of B2B settings and unpack how the implementation of a CS strategy can complement existing sales and service efforts to increase customer retention. We find that a central element to CS management is the tracking of customer health, which is a new marketing metric that is viewed as the pulse of CS strategy. Customer health is a formative metric comprised of objective and subjective data points that track (1) relationship quality, (2) product usage, and (3) customer value realization. CS managers leverage customer health data to proactively manage B2B relationships and reduce churn. While CS management has been widely adopted, we also find that not all CS implementations are initially successful. As such, we describe contingency factors related to short-term ambiguities within the organization and long-term factors that impact implementation of CS management. Given the nascent nature of research on CS management in the marketing literature, our article closes with a comprehensive set of future research opportunities and emerging challenges for firms focusing on customer success.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2023.09.002 [Google]
Ashaduzzaman, M., S. Weaven, M. Ross, C. Jebarajakirthy, J. Surachartkumtonkun and H. I. Maseeh (2023): A meta‐analysis on peer‐to‐peer accommodation adoption, Psychology & Marketing, 40(3758), pp.2504-2525
Peer‐to‐peer‐accommodation, a sharing economy‐based business model, enables using unutilized houses, apartments, and rooms of individuals to provide shared accommodation to tourists and travelers. On account of the importance of peer‐to‐peer accommodation, many studies have been conducted on factors/stimuli driving peer‐to‐peer accommodation adoption; however, findings remain inconsistent and fragmented. Accordingly, using the stimulus‐organism‐response model, this meta‐analysis provides generalized findings on determinants driving peer‐to‐peer accommodation adoption. Our meta‐analysis shows that stimuli (service characteristics, psychological aspects, social aspects, and technological aspects) drive the organism (perceived service quality) which in turn drives peer‐to‐peer accommodation adoption. Further, our moderation analysis shows that the relationship between these stimuli and the organism, and the relationship between the organism and peer‐to‐peer accommodation adoption, vary depending on four moderators: sample type, country of study, survey administration method, and sample size. Overall, this study contributes to the stimulus‐organism‐response theory by extending it to the meta‐analytical approach and suggesting a new organism for inclusion in the original stimulus‐organism‐response model. This meta‐analysis also contributes to the peer‐to‐peer accommodation and sharing economy literature and provides practical recommendations for accommodation platform providers and their listed houses to develop marketing strategy and policy.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.21916 [Google]
Brengman, M., K. Willems, L. De Gauquier and B. Vanderborght (2023): Media richness effectiveness: Humanoid robots with or without voice, or just a tablet kiosk?, Psychology & Marketing, (3759), pp.1
Humanoid robots can serve as in‐store communication medium, providing functional as well as hedonic value. Previous studies have demonstrated their proficiency in providing
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.21948 [Google]
Garner, D., J. H. Tatara and S. Jha (2023): Good morning, sunshine: How time‐of‐day of complaint submittal can affect customer satisfaction with company response time, Psychology & Marketing, (3760), pp.1
Traditional models of consumer behavior assume that customers perceive factors, e.g., time, in a rational manner throughout the day. For example, the same time period of an hour should, fundamentally, be evaluated as the same as an hour in the afternoon. Yet, across three experimental studies, we find evidence counter to this belief. Under the theoretical framework of the categorization of time, we posit that the unconscious categorization of time influences our satisfaction with company response time due to perceptions of time and resource depletion. We empirically demonstrate that the time‐of‐day of complaint submission impacts satisfaction with company response time such that the same company response time will be perceived as more satisfying in the morning than when received in the afternoon. This previously overlooked relationship builds on a robust and growing literature examining timing strategies in service recovery. We provide both low/no‐cost initiatives as well as strategic timing prioritization for marketing practitioners to maximize customer satisfaction with firm response time.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.21950 [Google]
Flacandji, M., J. Cusin and R. Lunardo (2023): When and why signaling frontline employee inexperience can prove to be an asset: Effects on consumer forgiveness for service failure, Psychology & Marketing, 40(3761), pp.2728-2742
The extant literature on service failure focuses mainly on how to recover from such incidents. However, companies can act before a service failure occurs to mitigate its negative effects. Building on signaling theory, we adopt a mixed‐method approach based on five studies using different types of analyses (textual and content analysis, and multivariate analysis) to investigate the effect of signaling frontline employee inexperience on customer responses to service failure due to an error committed by an employee. Five studies provide evidence that highlighting inexperience—either informally (through a conversation) or formally (through an in‐training badge)—can act as a signal that prompts customers to be more forgiving toward frontline employees, and such consumer forgiveness then serves as an underlying mechanism to explain repatronage intention. This research also tests and explores the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the inexperience signal. Our findings have various implications for professionals showing how useful it can be to signal the inexperience of a frontline employee who makes an error that leads to a service failure to be given a second chance, and how certain precautions should be taken to avoid the pitfalls of such a signaling strategy.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.21897 [Google]
Kui, D. and H. Tanriverdi (2023): DOES IT ENABLE COLLUSION OR COMPETITION: EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF IT ON SERVICE PRICING IN MULTIMARKET MULTIHOSPITAL SYSTEMS, MIS Quarterly, 47(3762), pp.1425-1454
In the U.S., multihospital systems (MHSs) charge significantly higher prices for hospital services than stand-alone hospitals. Rivalry restraint theory suggests that MHS with multimarket contact (MMC) can tacitly collude and mutually forebear from price competition to keep their prices above competitive levels. We posit that the success of such MMC-induced rivalry restraints (the truce) is affected by two conflicting roles of IT at the corporate level and market unit levels, respectively. The corporate parent seeks to standardize IT applications enterprise-wide to coordinate market units as a means of jointly implementing the rivalry restraint strategy and keeping prices high enterprise-wide. However, market units, i.e., the member hospitals of MHS clustered in geographic patient markets, face competitive pressures to reduce their service costs. Market units seek to use differentiated IT applications to achieve cost reductions, which then fuel price competition in local markets, jeopardize the sustainability of the truce, and weaken the enterprise-wide price effects of the corporate parent’s rivalry restraint strategy. In a longitudinal study of 195 multihospital systems in the U.S. in the 2005-2013 time period, we found support for these ideas. The corporate-wide standardization of the operational IT of MHS complements the rivalry restraint strategy to increase enterprise-wide prices. Market units’ use of differentiated analytical IT reduces costs in local markets and weakens the price effects of the rivalry restraint strategy. The study advances IS research and practice by theorizing how the corporate-level and the market unit-level IT of a multi-unit, multimarket (MUMM) organization can have opposing moderating effects on the link between MMC and the average prices charged by the MUMM organization.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2022/16764 [Google]
Pei, J., P. Yan and S. Kumar (2023): No Permanent Friend or Enemy: Impacts of the IIoT-Based Platform in the Maintenance Service Market, Management Science, 69(3763), pp.6800-6817
As the industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) is becoming increasingly valuable, manufacturers are eager to establish IIoT-based platforms for preventative maintenance (PM). These platforms reposition the roles of manufacturers and reshape the patterns of the after-sales service market. Manufacturers can adopt either the competitive strategy by introducing improved after-sales services to compete with independent maintenance, repair, and operations firms (MROs) or the “coopetitive” strategy by simultaneously opening the platform to these MROs. However, relevant research on this topic remains scarce. Hence, our study fills this gap by investigating a manufacturer’s decision for the IIoT-based platform and the subsequent relationship with an MRO. First, we find that even when the product value is relatively low and the IIoT adoption increases PM cost; interestingly, it is sometimes beneficial for the manufacturer to establish the platform. Next, we find that even if the royalty revenue is lower than the increased IIoT costs, the manufacturer may sometimes still adopt the coopetitive strategy of opening the platform. Moreover, with the opening of the platform, the manufacturer pays more technology investment, even in the competitive market. Furthermore, whenever the manufacturer opens the platform, the MRO can profit more by accessing the platform. Hence, there is sometimes a win-win equilibrium with the IIoT adoption. In addition, we find that the opening of the platform sometimes causes less customer surplus but generates more social welfare. Following the IIoT adoption, our findings offer insightful takeaways for the manufacturer’s decisions on the establishment and opening of the platform, the MRO’s reaction, and policymakers’ welfare policies. This paper was accepted by Jeannette Song, operations management. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71922009, 72188101, 71871080, and 72071057]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4733.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4733 [Google]
Li, W. D., I. Ashlagi and I. Lo (2023): Simple and Approximately Optimal Contracts for Payment for Ecosystem Services, Management Science, 69(3764), pp.7821-7837
Many countries have adopted payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs to reduce deforestation. Empirical evaluations find such programs, which pay forest owners to conserve forest, can lead to anywhere from no impact to a 50% reduction in deforestation level. To better understand the potential effectiveness of PES contracts, we use a principal–agent model, in which the agent has an observable amount of initial forest land and a privately known baseline conservation level. Commonly used conditional contracts perform well when the environmental value of forest is sufficiently high or sufficiently low, but can do arbitrarily poorly compared with the optimal contract for intermediate values. We identify a linear contract with a distribution-free per-unit price that guarantees at least half of the optimal contract payoff. A numerical study using U.S. land use data supports our findings and illustrates when linear or conditional contracts are likely to be more effective. This paper was This paper was accepted by Beril Toktay, Special Section of Management Science on Business and Climate Change. Funding: W. Dai Li was supported by a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. I. Lo was supported by an Environmental Venture Project Grant from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Supplemental Material: Data and the e-companion are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4273.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4273 [Google]
Zhang, Y., B. Li and S. Qian (2023): Ridesharing and Digital Resilience for Urban Anomalies: Evidence from the New York City Taxi Market, Information Systems Research, 34(3765), pp.1775-1790
This article investigates how and why the traditional on-demand service (i.e., taxies) and ridesharing platforms (e.g., Uber) perform in contexts of urban uncertainty. We consider different types of unexpected urban anomalies and collect large-scale trip data on taxi and ridesharing services. Empirically, we employ a difference-in-differences econometric model to compare the platform-level performances (measured by the number of fulfilled trips) of a traditional taxi system and a ridesharing platform after urban anomaly shocks. We observe that the ridesharing platform significantly outperforms the traditional taxi platform in coping with the uncertainties brought about by unexpected anomalies. We conclude, conservatively, that the technological effect and technology-enabled supply elasticity, are the main factors determining the differences between the platforms during an urban anomaly. This work offers important insights into the design of platform strategies, especially for stimulation of the labor supply and incentivization of the adoption and use of technology in urban transportation systems in response to anomalous urban upheavals. Urban anomalies bring uncertainties to society, urban transportation systems, and businesses. Some urban anomalies, such as no-notice and/or unpredictable terrorist attacks or other urban strikes, if not handled in timely ways may result in loss of life or property and pose tremendous risks to public safety overall. Previous studies have focused on developing emergency-management technology but without in-depth analysis exploring how technology-mediated digital systems perform in reality. Besides, the recent literature has demonstrated significant interest in analyzing and comparing the traditional on-demand service (i.e., taxies) and ridesharing platforms (e.g., Uber). The majority of prior studies have focused on their complementary roles in determining environmental conditions. Little is known, however, regarding how and why the two types of platforms perform in contexts of uncertainty (e.g., under emergency situations). This paper aims to bridge this literature gap. Specifically, we consider different types of unexpected urban anomalies (including terrorist attacks, car crashes, and subway shutdowns) and collect large-scale trip data on taxi and ridesharing services. Empirically, we employ a difference-in-differences econometric model to compare the platform-level performances (measured by the number of fulfilled trips) of a traditional taxi system and a ridesharing platform after urban anomaly shocks. We observe that the ridesharing platform significantly outperforms the traditional taxi platform in coping with the uncertainties brought about by unexpected anomalies. We conduct a set of robustness checks to verify our findings and propose multiple possibilities to explain them. We conclude, conservatively, that the technological effect and the technology-enabled supply elasticity of the digital platforms are the main factors determining the differences between the platforms during an urban anomaly. This work offers important insights into the design of platform strategies, especially for the stimulation of the labor supply and incentivization of the adoption and use of technology in urban transportation systems in response to anomalous urban upheavals. History: Wonseok Oh, Senior Editor; Tianshu Sun, Associate Editor. Funding: Y. Zhang acknowledges the funding support from the National Nature Science Foundation of China [Grant 72272003]. S. Qian acknowledges the support from the National Science Foundation Award [CMMI-1751448]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.1212.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.1212 [Google]
Nandankar, S., A. Sachan, A. Adhikari and A. Mukherjee (2023): Developing and validating e-marketplace service quality model in B2G e-commerce settings: a mixed-methods approach, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 43(3766), pp.1809-1840
Purpose: The research aims to qualitatively explore e-marketplace service quality (EMSQ) from the perspective of an industrial buyer as a sole decision-maker. It further intends to quantitatively examine its impact on the industrial buyer’s perceived value (PV), overall satisfaction (SAT), and e-loyalty (ELOY) in the context of business-to-government (B2G) e-commerce. Design/methodology/approach: The research used an exploratory sequential mixed-method design. A qualitative exploratory study of EMSQ was conducted using a Straussian grounded theory (GT) technique, followed by an explanatory quantitative study using PLS-SEM to evaluate causal links between various research variables. Findings: In the area of e-services, the investigation found that the hierarchical structure of EMSQ encompasses six broadly applicable dimensions and one B2G context-specific dimension of the e-governance process quality. The study also reinforced previous research findings in the B2C and B2B e-commerce domains, highlighting that e-service quality positively impacts online buyer’s PV, SAT and ELOY. Research limitations/implications: This research contributed to the area of e-service operations by developing and validating the EMSQ model in the B2G e-commerce settings. Further, it has opened up new research avenues in B2G e-commerce. Practical implications: The findings from this research highlighted that e-service operations managers should focus on usability, technological concerns, product/vendor quality concerns, customer support reliability, along with effective e-governance, ordering and logistics processes for e-business success. It also provides policymakers with guidelines for making B2G e-marketplaces sustainable. Originality/value: To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study employing the GT and PLS-SEM techniques to explore EMSQ from the viewpoint of industrial buyers in B2G e-commerce. The study contributed to prior literature by proposing and validating the hierarchical EMSQ model.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJOPM-05-2022-0333 [Google]
Momeni, K., C. Raddats and M. Martinsuo (2023): Mechanisms for developing operational capabilities in digital servitization, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 43(3767), pp.101-127
Purpose: Digital servitization concerns how manufacturers utilize digital technologies to enhance their provision of services. Although digital servitization requires that manufacturers possess new capabilities, in contrast to strategic (or dynamic) capabilities, little is known about how they develop the required operational capabilities. The paper investigates the mechanisms for developing operational capabilities in digital servitization. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents an exploratory study based on 15 large manufacturers operating in Europe engaged in digital servitization. Findings: Three operational capability development mechanisms are set out that manufacturers use to facilitate digital servitization: learning (developing capabilities in-house), building (bringing the requisite capabilities into the manufacturer), and acquiring (utilizing the capabilities of other actors). These mechanisms emphasize exploitation and exploration efforts within manufacturers and in collaborations with upstream and downstream partners. The findings demonstrate the need to combine these mechanisms for digital servitization according to combinations that match each manufacturer’s traditional servitization phase: (1) initial phase – building and acquiring, (2) middle phase – learning, building and acquiring, and (3) advanced phase – learning and building. Originality/value: This study reveals three operational capability development mechanisms, highlighting the parallel use of these mechanisms for digital servitization. It provides a holistic understanding of operational capability development mechanisms used by manufacturers by combining three theoretical perspectives (organizational learning, absorptive capacity, and network perspectives). The paper demonstrates that digital servitization requires the significant application of building and acquiring mechanisms to develop the requisite operational capabilities.
Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJOPM-04-2022-0259 [Google]
