Journal of Service Research

While organizational scholars have established a strong base of research on workplace incivility, one understudied aspect is how witnessing incivility directed toward employees affects the witness’ actions. This research seeks to close this gap by examining how consumer incivility targeting a service employee impacts emotions, intentions, and financial compensation provided by the witness. Drawing from social exchange theory, we propose witnessing incivility leads to feelings of pity, followed by increased emotional support and, ultimately, an increased tip for the target employee. We find support for our proposed relationships across four studies. Additionally, we demonstrate that this process is robust to influences from bystander effects but is conditional on service quality and group membership of the uncivil consumer in relation to the witnessing consumer. The findings provide theoretical advancement to the growing literature on behavioral responses of witnesses of incivility.

Graphical Abstract

This is a visual representation of the abstract.

While service industries like healthcare and elder-care increasingly use technology to address staff shortages, its potential to support consumers experiencing vulnerability remains under-explored and under-utilized. For instance, elderly people who are experiencing vulnerability due to language loss or reduced proficiency in communicating in their national language can be supported by voice-based interfaces, such as robots, that can communicate with them in their native regional language. However, responses to such regional language adaptations, as well as the potential managerial benefits of tailoring service offerings to consumers with specific linguistic needs, remain unclear. This study begins to explore this area and reveals that elderly consumers prefer to interact with robots in their regional language rather than in the national language. We also find that caregivers are willing to pay a 30% premium for a companion robot that can use a regional language, and that regional language capabilities foster trust in robots in the general population, too. The theoretical contribution of the study draws from linguistics to show that these positive effects arise because regional synthetic speech is processed more fluently. The study also highlights human-likeness as a crucial boundary condition, as regional language adaptations unexpectedly backfire when delivered with machine-like voices. For service organizations, regional adaptations in voice-based interfaces present a unique opportunity to better serve linguistically vulnerable consumers while also fostering more positive attitudes in the general population, provided there is a high degree of human-likeness.

Graphical Abstract

Customer experience management (CXM) is a strategic priority for service firms, yet its conceptualization and implementation in business-to-business (B2B) markets remain underdeveloped. Existing research offers limited insight into the nature of customer experience (CX) as a managerial objective and into competitive CXM strategies. This study addresses these gaps by examining the nature of B2B firms’ target experiences (TXs), defined as the set of customer reactions a firm intentionally seeks to evoke, and how TXs inform CXM strategy. Using an abductive approach, we conducted a qualitative field study of forty-one B2B service providers practicing CXM with strategic intent. Our findings reveal two TX approaches: general TX, emphasizing reactions’ valence (e.g., positive, improved), and specific TX, describing qualitatively distinct reactions (e.g., effortless, caring, inspiring). The findings show how the nature of TXs shapes the execution of CXM, shared CX culture, and CX-based competitive positioning. We further identify two competitive CXM strategies—responsive and proactive—and articulate their conditions and implications. This study advances service research by clarifying CX as a managerial objective, explicating TX’s role within CXM, and introducing a framework for TX-informed CXM strategies. For B2B service firms, the study offers actionable insights to advance differentiation through CX.

Graphical Abstract

This is a visual representation of the abstract.

Growing cost pressures and customer demands toward digital engagement at the organizational frontline have accelerated business-to-business (B2B) salespeople’s adoption of hybrid selling, in which the same frontline salesperson combines face-to-face and remote (video or phone) sales calls to service the same customer. However, many salespeople fear that efficiency and potential interaction quantity gains come at the cost of interaction quality losses, potentially harming their customer relationships. We conceptualize hybrid selling and establish its financial and relational consequences based on two field studies with a leading European B2B manufacturer. Study 1 establishes an inverted U-shaped sales performance effect using customer relationship management (CRM) data from 3,565 customers (15,172 interactions). Study 2 matches customer survey and CRM data for additional 651 customers (5,971 interactions) to extend sales performance findings to relationship quality and show that product complexity, customer channel preferences, and salesperson interaction knowledge shape its effectiveness. We find that, in comparison to pure face-to-face selling, the optimal hybrid mix can increase performance by up to 27 percent in some interaction contexts, while in others, a pure remote approach can harm performance by up to 32 percent. Our results provide guidelines for salespeople and their executives when developing effective hybrid selling strategies to improve B2B performance.

Graphical Abstract

The role of chief marketing officers (CMOs) for service innovation has mostly been overlooked in empirical research. Particularly unclear is how CMOs’ personal career experiences shape their firms’ pace of service innovation. We address this issue by examining whether and when specialist CMOs (with a limited variety of career experiences) and generalist CMOs (with a wide variety of career experiences) influence service innovation outcomes, arguing that a “sweet spot” of career variety—a mix of specialist and generalist experiences—is most beneficial. Drawing on service innovations that 209 U.S. firms introduced between 2009 and 2020, we find support for the sweet-spot proposition: Adding generalist experiences to specialized insights increases the pace of service innovations, but only up to an inflection point. Introducing CMOs’ (1) strategic, (2) financial, and (3) operational discretion as important contingencies, we show that service innovation in stable industries, in which CMOs’ strategic discretion is reduced, benefits from specialists. Contrary to our expectation, career experience effects are attenuated in situations of high financial leeway, possibly because money helps overcome any disadvantages in CMOs’ ability to innovate. Finally, mixed-career CMOs shine especially bright with high operational discretion, that is, when organizational processes favor service innovation over selling existing products.

Empowered by advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and data technologies, service personnel can deliver highly personalized communication using automatically acquired consumer data. However, as firms increasingly rely on such data to enhance service efficiency, consumers’ privacy concerns have become more salient. Drawing on the persuasion knowledge model, this research integrates field data with four controlled experiments to examine how response speed following data acquisition influences consumer reactions. We find that faster (vs. slower) responses, defined as those delivered moderately earlier (vs. later) than consumers’ normative expectations in comparable service contexts, attenuate consumers’ positive reactions to marketing communications. This effect is driven by a serial mediation involving perceived firm eagerness to use information and privacy concerns, highlighting privacy concerns as one of the key psychological mechanisms shaping consumer reactions. Importantly, this negative effect is attenuated when firms provide prewarning messages about upcoming data-based communication, when service involvement is low, or in service recovery contexts. These findings suggest that response speed should be managed strategically. While overly fast responses may backfire in high-involvement or routine services, combining fast responses with prewarning strategies can help firms balance efficiency and privacy perceptions in digital service environments.

Graphical Abstract

Telemedicine services leverage information and communication technologies toward innovating and enabling the delivery of healthcare. We propose and empirically analyze a framework for understanding the impact of telemedicine services on health outcomes at scale across communities in the United States. Our analysis of county-level panel data reveals that increased availability of telemedicine services improves community health that is central to the well-being of a community. We evaluate the benefits of telemedicine services in aggregate—that is, overall health outcomes—and along specific dimensions of reductions in premature death rate, low birthweight rate, preventable hospital stays, smoking rate, and the need for diabetes monitoring. In addition, we find that greater availability of telemedicine services is associated with decreased COVID-19-related mortality. Heterogeneity analyses further show that lower socioeconomic status reduces the effectiveness of telemedicine services while superior digital infrastructure and greater innovation capacity enhance its effectiveness. Demographics by way of higher proportions of Black and female community members enhance the effectiveness of telemedicine services, whereas a higher proportion of older adults reduces its effectiveness. Taken together, the proposed framework and the findings underscore the potential of telemedicine services to improve community health while recognizing the moderating effects of contextual factors. This study makes a significant contribution toward advancing the literature on seamless coordination of digital service innovations to drive community-wide health benefits.

Graphical Abstract

The current research investigates how frontline employee (FLE) creativity contributes to sales performance through value-based selling and how contextual conditions shape this process. Drawing on Amabile’s Componential Theory of Creativity and the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability framework, we test a multilevel moderated mediation model using data from 252 employee-manager dyads in a Canadian art supply retail chain. Findings reveal that creativity influences sales performance indirectly through value-based selling, supporting a full mediation. In terms of moderation effects, the positive impact of creativity on value-based selling is even stronger when managerial job engagement is high. We note a different moderation pattern for organizational commitment. Indeed, when organizational commitment is high, FLEs sustain strong value-based selling regardless of their level of creativity. However, when organizational commitment is low, creativity becomes a key differentiating factor, enhancing value-based selling. Overall, these findings position value-based selling as the behavioral mechanism through which creativity affects sales performance and clarify the boundary conditions under which creativity has more or less effect on this central mediator. We further discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings for frontline service employees.

Graphical Abstract

Service research has typically treated technology as a tool directed by human actors to influence service systems; however, the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) challenges this assumption and our understanding of service system transformations. Drawing on information systems (IS) research, we examine how GenAI’s unique capabilities influence service system transformation mechanisms—particularly emergence and phase transitions—yielding three contributions to service research. First, we theorize how human–GenAI hybrids give rise to hybrid intelligence and influence transformation through unplanned, stabilized, and intelligent forms of delegation in service exchange, and through GenAI-enabled capacities of autoreflexivity and autoreformation. Second, we refine the understanding of service system transformation mechanisms by showing how the compound effects of first-order and fourth-order emergence explain the frequency of phase transitions, while heightened reflexivity and reformation influence their speed. Third, we extend service system design research by demonstrating how GenAI can enhance human reflexivity and reformation, challenging human-centric assumptions by positioning human–GenAI hybrids as contributors to service system design. We discuss how managers can strategically mobilize GenAI to influence markets and institutional arrangements. We conclude with future research directions addressing empirical, ethical, and design-oriented questions related to human–GenAI hybrids in service system transformation.

Past studies on service waits have primarily applied two theoretical perspectives—the expectancy–disconfirmation model and the psychological‑cost model—leading to conflicting explanations of how customers react to waits. To reconcile these perspectives, we propose a conceptual framework that integrates the dual perspectives of customer wait perceptions and identify four key moderators that shape which mechanism becomes more influential: wait stage, wait knowledge, wait regret, and wait importance. We validate our conceptual framework through a structural‑equation‑modeling meta‑analysis of 129 studies from 103 articles (672 effect sizes; N = 38,967). Our conceptual integration highlights a coherent system of interdependent mechanisms that shape how customers experience, evaluate, and emotionally respond to waiting. Its validity, however, depends on the efficacy of the moderators. During the wait, subjective time primarily drives psychological cost, heightening anxiety and anger—especially when regret is present. After the wait, subjective time instead shapes how acceptable the wait feels. Disconfirmation becomes more influential when customers have clearer information that strengthens their expectations. When the wait is important, wait acceptability becomes the dominant predictor of service satisfaction. These findings underscore the need to balance strategies that reduce psychological cost and manage expectations, particularly as technology transforms waiting experiences.

Graphical Abstract

Consumers experiencing financial vulnerability often face multiple intersecting barriers to well-being. Accordingly, social service systems have begun integrating programs to more holistically address the many factors affecting financial vulnerability. Results from a qualitative case study show how an integrated approach to financial vulnerability influences consumer experiences as they navigate through social service systems. Findings explain how initiation into social service systems requires adequate client readiness to comply with entry conditions placed by service providers. Furthermore, while many organizations believe readiness must be attained prior to entering the system, we find that a network of internal and external providers can support the cocreation of client readiness. Integration into the system deepens as clients take on structured responsibilities, as providers take on risks in supporting clients through vulnerabilities, and as both clients and providers develop mutual trust. The authors introduce the concept of contingent value propositions to explain how providers can structure services to make support available based on client readiness and cocreative action. Client transitions through the service system can be hindered or supported by integration with external partners. Implications for social service theory and practice are discussed, including recommendations for delivering holistic social service support to consumers experiencing financial vulnerability.

Graphical Abstract

Consumers experiencing vulnerability are prevalent in healthcare contexts across the globe, so it is surprising that such groups do not typically feature in the extant literature on service separation. Telehealth as a spatially separated service offering requires a combined perspective that captures the experiences of both users’ experiencing vulnerability and providers’ delivering the separated service. The inclusion of these actor perspectives with health-related vulnerabilities is essential to fully understand the impacts, dynamics, and effects of a spatially separated service. We address this need by conducting a twelve-month longitudinal qualitative study of an online mental health service in Brazil, drawing on qualitative data from patients experiencing vulnerability and psychologists. Phenomenographic interviews (n = 67) reveal the consequences of spatial separation on service encounter actors, how spatial separation impacts relational dynamics and roles between users experiencing vulnerability and providers over time, and how these service actors overcome challenges from spatial separation for value creation.

Graphical Abstract

As mental illnesses surge globally, delivering effective care for mentally disordered and disabled individuals is crucial. While frontline employees play a critical role in service interactions with vulnerable consumers—a central issue in transformative service research—there is limited understanding of how frontline employees’ behaviors can influence adherence, defined as the extent to which individuals follow healthcare providers’ recommendations. Taking an empirics-first approach, we analyze longitudinal field data from 118 individuals with mental illnesses over 12 months, yielding 2,445 observations. Guided by social support theory, we employ a split-hazard model to examine how distinct frontline employee behaviors affect adherence in Communication and Cognitive Tasks, Daily Living Activities, and Social and Community Integration. Our findings highlight the need for tailored behavioral strategies, showing that listening and active conversation consistently enhance adherence, while repetition significantly reduces it. Our study offers novel insights into how frontline employee behaviors can improve the well-being of vulnerable consumers, particularly in mental healthcare. These insights inform both theory and practice by advancing social support as a framework for frontline service delivery and providing actionable strategies to improve care and adherence.

Graphical Abstract

Frontline service employees are integral to the successful implementation of firms’ customer relationship management strategies. Conventional methods typically utilize explicit incentive contracts to motivate employees to align with organizational objectives. Nevertheless, the effects of new organizational goals without specified rewards (NOG-WSR) on employees’ performance are not well documented in the literature. Leveraging a quasi-experimental design, this study analyzed the impact of a new organizational goal on employees’ responses, introduced by a large service firm that did not specify explicit incentives to its branches. Empirical findings from 48,464 individual–month observations reveal that NOG-WSR has a positive short-term effect on employees’ goal-related performance. More importantly, we identified employees who are more likely to respond to the NOG-WSR. This study extends the expectancy theory and reveals that NOG-WSR is effective in motivating employees who have a higher expectancy of being able to attain the new goal and a higher expectancy of reward tied to the new goal. Contributions and implications are discussed.

From retail and transport to hospitality and live events, customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions are integral to many service experiences. However, C2C interactions are not always positive, and customers regularly become targets of other customers’ misbehavior. Although such C2C misbehavior has always been a challenge for firms, it has escalated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with incidents becoming not only more frequent but also more intense and severe. However, it remains unknown how customers assess the magnitude of C2C misbehavior. Four studies, including 62 repertory grid interviews using scenario-based and diary-based approaches with international participants from Germany and the United Kingdom, reveal six dimensions that underlie customers’ magnitude perceptions: three intensity-related dimensions that assess the magnitude of the misbehavior itself and three severity-related dimensions that examine the magnitude of the misbehavior’s impact on other customers. Several sorting studies with 99 U.S. participants support the robustness, generalizability, distinctiveness, and hierarchical structure of our identified magnitude dimensions. By uncovering the facets that underlie customers’ evaluations of an incident’s perceived magnitude, our study provides an empirically grounded conceptualization and typology of C2C misbehavior. Managerially, this research enables firms, communities, and governments to monitor and categorize misbehavior incidents more effectively and to develop more targeted mitigation strategies.

Graphical Abstract

The infusion of generative AI (GenAI) is already disrupting established services. This technology’s generative and agentic nature challenges the design and management of service routines, which have been previously handled primarily by frontline service employees. Guided by organizational routines theory, our longitudinal study (2020–2024) examines how the infusion of GenAI changes routines in customer support services. We gathered interview data from 41 employees, managers, and AI experts in two phases, pre- and post-GenAI. Based on the analysis of the qualitative data, we revealed seven recurring micro-level augmentation patterns, illustrating how GenAI-infused service routines function. The results show that GenAI is primarily embedded in the backstage of knowledge-intensive services, from which it then permeates the frontstage. We contribute to the literature on hybrid human–AI service delivery by identifying augmentation patterns and conceptualizing service permeation via two mechanisms: (1) simultaneous service permeation, which unfolds as employees leverage GenAI in real-time and integrate GenAI’s responses, recommendations, and adaptations into the frontstage; (2) sequential service permeation, which emerges as employees perform new routines of documentation and AI feeding to facilitate GenAI’s adaptability in frontstage and backstage operations. The MAPs and service permeation mechanisms guide practitioners in integrating GenAI into service routines and managing novel employee-GenAI collaborations.

Graphical Abstract

Systemic exclusion remains a significant barrier for individuals experiencing vulnerabilities, limiting their participation in service systems—configurations of interdependent actors, institutions, and infrastructures that shape service environments. This study examines how inclusive service systems evolve through dynamic, multi-actor engagement by integrating systems thinking, transformative service research, and macro-social marketing. Using an abductive, multi-method design, we focus on the Deaf community in Indonesia as a salient case and combine interviews with Deaf and hearing individuals, netnographic analysis of Deaf-oriented online content, rapid ethnographies at community events, and computational topic modeling of user-generated discourse. The analysis uncovers four evolving modalities of system transformation—Surface-Level Engagement, In-Depth Exploration, Co-Creative Participation, and Sustained Involvement—which trace how micro-level relational practices and communicative adjustments accumulate into meso- and macro-level shifts in structures and norms. We conceptualize inclusion as an emergent, iterative process rather than a stable end-state and propose a scalable framework to diagnose and facilitate inclusive transformation in complex service environments. The study advances theoretical perspectives on inclusive service systems and macro-social marketing and offers actionable guidance for designing and governing service systems that give marginalized groups an active role in shaping services.

Graphical Abstract

To investigate how socially assistive robots shape caring practices and support well-being in dementia care settings, this study focuses on agencement—emergent configurations of humans, nonhuman actors, and discourses. Using practice-based action research, the authors introduced the companion robot Hiro in two Italian nursing homes over an 8-month period, involving 22 cognitively impaired residents, followed by a 1-year follow-up. Drawing on qualitative data from observations, interviews, and field notes, the study advances three key contributions, formalized through five propositions. First, caring constitutes a sociomaterial practice, emerging through relational, embodied engagements in which care recipients actively participate in shaping the care. Second, the operationalization of agencement in human–robot dynamics shows how Hiro mobilizes sensory experiences (touch, sound, and movement) to generate relational entanglements that transform caregiving roles and flows of affect. Third, a proposed framework of affect-based well-being, articulated across three interrelated sensory dimensions—psychological (sensory intimacy), physical (sensory responsiveness), and social (sensory bonding)—extends existing service research by capturing embodied, situated, and relational dimensions of well-being. For managers, the findings provide actionable insights for using companion robots to enhance care practices by supporting affect-based well-being, reinforcing relational ties, and enabling personalized, dignified sensory experiences in resource-constrained settings.

Graphical Abstract

Service industries, which dominate advanced economies, display a productivity paradox: Despite quick adoption of digital and self-service technologies, measured productivity growth remains slow. We reinterpret service productivity using a Holistic Service Productivity (HSP) framework that includes customer surplus and effort in measuring productivity. We define productivity as the ratio of total value created—producer surplus plus consumer surplus—to total input, which includes both firm resources and customer time, effort, and data. Based on service-dominant logic and welfare economics, HSP addresses mismeasurement by capturing co-created value that traditional firm-focused metrics miss. A typology based on service separability and customer involvement shows the framework’s versatility, and examples and simulations demonstrate how HSP reveals hidden efficiency improvements and highlights cost-shifting. We finish with managerial and policy implications, showing how HSP can guide decision-making and enhance official productivity statistics. For managers, HSP helps distinguish real efficiency gains from cost-shifting and directs investments toward mutually beneficial solutions. By highlighting the co-created value of modern services for both firms and customers, HSP offers a new perspective for understanding and boosting productivity and presents a transformative method for measuring service productivity.