Traditionally, the Journal of Service Research awards are given out during the Frontiers in Service conference. This summer 2024 in Florida, the winner of the best paper published in 2023 were announced. Join us in recognizing the authors’ contribution to our field.
Best Paper Award Winner
Jochen Wirtz, Werner H. Kunz, Nicole Hartley, and James Tarbit (2023),
Corporate Digital Responsibility in Service Firms and Their Ecosystems
Digitization, artificial intelligence, and service robots carry serious ethical, privacy, and fairness risks. Using the lens of corporate digital responsibility (CDR), we examine these risks and their mitigation in service firms and make five contributions. First, we show that CDR is critical in service contexts because of the vast streams of customer data involved and digital service technology’s omnipresence, opacity, and complexity. Second, we synthesize the ethics, privacy, and fairness literature using the CDR data and technology life-cycle perspective to understand better the nature of these risks in a service context. Third, to provide insights on the origins of these risks, we examine the digital service ecosystem and the related flows of money, service, data, insights, and technologies. Fourth, we deduct that the underlying causes of CDR issues are trade-offs between good CDR practices and organizational objectives (e.g., profit opportunities versus CDR risks) and introduce the CDR calculus to capture this. We also conclude that regulation will need to step in when a firm’s CDR calculus becomes so negative that good CDR is unlikely. Finally, we advance a set of strategies, tools, and practices service firms can use to manage these trade-offs and build a strong CDR culture.
2023 JSR Best Article Award Finalists
It is Really Not a Game: An Integrative Review of Gamification for Service Research Robert Ciuchita, Jonas Heller, Sarah Köcher, and Thomas Leclercq
Gamification has attracted considerable practitioner attention and has become a viable tactic for influencing behavior, boosting innovation, and improving marketing outcomes across industries. Simultaneously, studies on the use of gamification techniques have emerged in diverse fields, including computer science, education, and healthcare. Despite the broad popularity of gamification in other fields, it has received only limited attention in the service literature. Moreover, the findings of extant studies on gamification in the service field are inconclusive and suggest an incomplete understanding of the employment of gamification in service contexts. Thus, this study aims to integrate the growing but scattered cross-disciplinary literature on gamification and to emphasize its relevance to service research. Specifically, we first conceptualize gamification for service and differentiate it from related concepts. Then, using a systematic literature review, we identify 34 empirical articles that reflect this gamification conceptualization and can be connected to relevant service research themes (e.g., customer participation, experience, and loyalty). Employing activity theory, we derive four higher-order functions of gamification: production, consumption, exchange, and distribution. Finally, we develop a research agenda to generate a better understanding of the central aspects within each of the identified gamification functions and stimulate future academic efforts on gamification in services.
https://doi.org/10.1177/10946705221076272
Customer Experience: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Application in Omnichannel Environments Markus Gahler, Jan F. Klein, and Michael Paul
Managing customer experiences has become a key strategic priority for service research and management. Yet researchers and managers lack a customer experience (CX) measure that applies to the different experience partners, touchpoints, and journey stages in the omnichannel environments of today’s service industries. Without such a common measure, empirical research on CX remains fragmented, and service companies continue to struggle to improve customer interactions in customer journeys. To address this shortcoming, this article proposes an omnichannel-capable measurement of CX that applies to different customer interactions in the omnichannel environment. With seven studies, the authors develop and validate a six-dimensional, 18-item CX scale. The proposed CX scale overcomes the fragmentation of existing scales in service research and provides a valid measure that can be used consistently for various customer interactions in omnichannel environments. This article details how the proposed CX scale can monitor and compare CX for different interactions in customer journeys (i.e., pain-point analysis), as well as improve CX features and their marketing outcomes (i.e., CX profiling). By overcoming the existing fragmentation in available scales and providing a common omnichannel CX measure, this CX scale establishes an empirical foundation for developing CX knowledge and advancing related service research.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10946705221126590
2023 JSR Best Reviewers
- Anna Mattila
- Paul W. Fombelle
- Holger Roschk
2023 JSR Outstanding AEs
- Andrea Ordanini
- Seigyoung Auh
- Martin Mende
