Journal of Service Theory and Practice最新文献

Purpose

(Digital) servitization, referring to service-driven strategies and their increasing implementation in manufacturing, is one of the most rapidly growing areas in industrial service research. However, the cultural change involved in successful servitization is a phenomenon that is widely observed but poorly understood. This research aims to clarify the processes of social construction as manufacturers change their organizational culture to transform into industrial service providers.

Design/methodology/approach

This research takes a systematic approach to integrate disparate literature on servitization into a cohesive framework for cultural change, which is purposefully augmented by rationale culled from organizational learning and sensemaking literature.

Findings

The organizational learning framework for cultural change in servitization introduces a dynamic perspective on servitizing organizations by explaining social processes between organizational and member-level cultural properties. It identifies three major cultural orientations toward service, digital and learning that govern successful servitization.

Originality/value

This research contributes to the servitization literature by presenting a new approach to reframe and explore cultural change processes across multiple levels, thus providing a concrete starting point for further research in this area.

Purpose

Consumers' perceptions of product intelligence affect their willingness to accept smart offerings. This paper explores how people perceive various smart products based on their smartness profiles, composed of five distinct smartness facets. Additionally, the study investigates how these perceptions of product intelligence impact consumers' evaluation of factors that either promote or impede the adoption of smart products. These factors are examined as potential mediators in the adoption process. This paper aims to determine if the value-based adoption model can be applied to a broad range of smart service systems.

Design/methodology/approach

Consumers assessed one of 28 smart products in a scenario-based quantitative study. Multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the conceptual model, taking the nested data structure into account.

Findings

The findings show that product smartness essentially enhances usage intention via adoption drivers (enjoyment and usefulness) and reduces usage intention via adoption barriers (intrusiveness). In particular, the ability to interact in a humanlike manner increases the benefits consumers perceive, which in turn increases consumer acceptance. Only the smartness characteristic of awareness impairs usage intention, mediated by the perceived benefits of enjoyment and usefulness.

Originality/value

In contrast to previous research, which usually focuses on single smart products, this work examines a variety of different products, which allows for better transferability of the results to other smart offerings. Furthermore, prior research has mainly focused on single facets of product smartness or researched smartness on an aggregated level. By considering the consumer perception of each smartness facet, the authors gain deeper insights into the perceptual differences regarding product smartness and how this affects technology adoption via conflicting key acceptance drivers and barriers.

Purpose

In servitization research, there has been a call to move further toward the development of business models based on a service approach. This article aims to answer this call by adopting service logic (SL) and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a service-centric business model called servification, defined as the process of identifying and developing strategies and organizational resources and processes to create a business model based on SL.

Design/methodology/approach

This article is conceptual and extends servitization in the direction of service-centric business model innovation by drawing on and extending SL.

Findings

The article defines service as a higher-order concept according to SL and develops the concept of a helping strategy as the foundation for a service-based business model. Further, it develops a typology of organizational resources and processes that must be developed for the emergence of such a business model.

Research limitations/implications

Since this article is the first to conceptually develop servification, more both theoretical and empirical research is naturally required. The development of servification takes servitization in the direction of service-based business model innovation and also contributes to the research on SL.

Practical implications

Servification enables the development of service-centric strategies and organizational resources and processes and service-based business models.

Originality/value

This article is the first to adopt SL in studies of business model innovation.

Purpose

The growing cost and difficulty related to “finding someone” suggests that the role of service organisations in explicitly supporting and designing opportunities for love between customers merits further attention. This study employs a multidisciplinary approach of both services marketing and the economics of mate choice to understand how service organisations can exercise the third place effect and facilitate human mate choice (love) opportunities for consumers in extended service encounters.

Design/methodology/approach

Three qualitative co-design workshops were conducted with actors (students, casual and professional staff) from the Australian university ecosystem (n = 36) to identify consumer expectations related to mate selection in third place service contexts. A quantitative online survey of (n = 1207) current Australian university students was used to rank the importance of core and enhancing service elements.

Findings

The authors find that love holds a status in the minds of some consumers as an implicitly expected by-product of participation within the core service consumption experience in third places. For service providers to facilitate mate choice opportunities in third places, the results suggest that the design of the connective mechanism(s) should maximise opportunities for informal consumer-to-consumer interaction to allow prospective partners to ascertain compatibility. Further, consumers expect the organisational facilitation of engagement in order to clarify expected etiquette and support goal congruence. In the tertiary education marketplace for love, there is an increased preference for interpersonal engagement by those studying on campus (compared to externally), and a positive relationship between duration of enrolment and increased priority for mate choice service provision.

Originality/value

This research makes a novel theoretical and empirical contribution by being the first exploration of the economics of third place love in the tertiary education sector, also being a research primer for the field of services marketing to consider service design in third places to support mate choice.

Purpose

This study aims to conceptualize the relationship of perceived artificial intelligence (AI) credibility with consumer-AI experiences. With the widespread deployment of AI in marketing and services, consumer-AI experiences are common and an emerging research area in marketing. Various factors affecting consumer-AI experiences have been studied, but one crucial factor – perceived AI credibility is relatively underexplored which the authors aim to envision and conceptualize.

Design/methodology/approach

This study employs a conceptual development approach to propose relationships among constructs, supported by 34 semi-structured consumer interviews.

Findings

This study defines AI credibility using source credibility theory (SCT). The conceptual framework of this study shows how perceived AI credibility positively affects four consumer-AI experiences: (1) data capture, (2) classification, (3) delegation, and (4) social interaction. Perceived justice is proposed to mediate this effect. Improved consumer-AI experiences can elicit favorable consumer outcomes toward AI-enabled offerings, such as the intention to share data, follow recommendations, delegate tasks, and interact more. Individual and contextual moderators limit the positive effect of perceived AI credibility on consumer-AI experiences.

Research limitations/implications

This study contributes to the emerging research on AI credibility and consumer-AI experiences that may improve consumer-AI experiences. This study offers a comprehensive model with consequences, mechanism, and moderators to guide future research.

Practical implications

The authors guide marketers with ways to improve the four consumer-AI experiences by enhancing consumers' perceived AI credibility.

Originality/value

This study uses SCT to define AI credibility and takes a justice theory perspective to develop the conceptual framework.

Purpose

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to understand how different forms of anthropomorphism, namely verbal and visual, can enhance or detract from the subjective well-being of consumers and their co-creation behaviors whilst collaborating with artificial intelligence (AI) service agents. Second, it seeks to understand if AI anxiety and trust in message, function as primary and secondary consumer appraisals of collaborating with AI service agents.

Design/methodology/approach

A conceptual model is developed using the theories of the uncanny valley and cognitive appraisal theory (CAT) with three hypotheses identified to guide the experimental work. The hypotheses are tested across three experimental studies which manipulate the level of anthropomorphism of AI.

Findings

Results demonstrate that verbal and visual anthropomorphism can assist consumer well-being and likelihood of co-creation. Further, this relationship is explained by the mediators of anxiety and trust.

Originality/value

The empirical results and theorizing suggest verbal anthropomorphism should be present (absent) and paired with low (high) visual anthropomorphism, which supports the “uncanny valley” effect. A moderated mediation relationship is established, which confirms AI anxiety and trust in a message as mediators of the AI service agent anthropomorphism-consumer subjective well-being/co-creation relationship. This supports the theorizing of the conceptual model based on the “uncanny valley” and CAT.

Purpose

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on value co-creation (VCC). However, a study providing a comprehensive summary of the current state of the art and common ground of the two fields is missing. The current study aims to fill this gap by conceptualizing the role of AI in VCC and customer decision-making.

Design/methodology/approach

The study reviews literature on VCC and AI together, including a total of 108 articles. To bring the literature together, the authors adopted the antecedents-mediators-outcomes framework and narrative approach that helped them develop a framework by integrating the antecedents, mediators and outcomes of AI-facilitated VCC. Furthermore, the authors also operationalized existing literature to facilitate an understanding of the role of AI in customer decision-making.

Findings

The study, in addition to identifying the common theoretical grounds of VCC and AI (human behavior, cognition and social interactions), operationalizes AI functionality, its characteristics and customer characteristics as the antecedents of AI-facilitated VCC. Moreover, based on literature, on the continuum of low-to-high involvement, four types of decision-making were identified as mediator of the relationship between AI characteristics, customer characteristics and VCC. Additionally, the authors found different categorizations of AI in literature as archetypes to support various forms of VCC.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the literature of VCC and AI by construing a comprehensive framework for analyzing AI's impact on VCC, envisioning customer–AI interaction as continual exchange of advantages in which characteristics of AI and customers play a critical role in customer decision-making and shaping VCC.

Purpose

Fintechs are expected to develop rapidly as technologies that help improve the efficiency of the traditional financial system, but an examination of fintech subbranches shows different behaviors. In some sub-branches, the transition has been accompanied by a higher speed and more success, but in some other sub-branches, the opposite has been observed. The difference in the development of fintech sub-branches and its reasons have been paid less attention. Therefore, this article aims to identify the factors affecting the transition.

Design/methodology/approach

The use of new technologies in financial services at the international level has led to the provision of fast, customized and economical services, and the fact that these services are welcomed by the users has created opportunities for fintech's transition. This qualitative research follows the socio-technical phenomenon of fintech transition through narrative research. For its formulation, the transition process of fintech sub-branches was analyzed based on the multi-level analytical framework and Geels et al.’s transition path theory.

Findings

Transition is a change from one socio-technical regime to another. The findings of the research showed that these changes are influenced by the following factors: provision of infrastructure, the support of industry incumbents from innovative financial services, policy-making, citizen's welcoming, improving the knowledge and expertise of actors, legal adjustments as well as provision of innovative services.

Originality/value

The fintech transition has a special nature because the speed of developments in fintech is high and there is a series of innovations that are continuously replaced by subsequent innovations. Existing models have often focused on the long-term transition of a technology. This article presents a new approach for the analysis of changes in the short term in such a way that, based on the position of the actors in favor of or against the technological changes and institutional changes of the transition, it has analyzed and identified the factors affecting the transition. By focusing on these factors, policymakers can direct the way of fintech transition and help accelerate and facilitate fintech transition.