"This prescient Handbook adopts an overarching perspective on service experiences in business contexts. Incorporating up-to-date research and empirical case studies, chapters focus on customer experience design, innovation and management in the digital era. The Handbook of Service Experience sheds new light on the field, presenting novel theoretical and managerial insights to enhance our understanding of this complex area. Global experts from academia and practice contribute by addressing key themes, including theoretically conceptualising the service experience and exploring how to leverage digital technologies to better design, innovate and manage customer experience, whilst also acknowledging sustainability considerations, risks and ethical implications. They present different perspectives across various public and private sectors, such as healthcare and the fast-food industry, as well as B2B services, to improve understanding of what a service experience is, how it can be facilitated, when it occurs, and why it is important. Comprehensive in scope, this unique Handbook is an invaluable resource for students and academics in business administration, digital marketing and service design, and organisational, social and occupational psychology. Its detailed practical applications and examinations of service experience will also be highly beneficial to professionals and entrepreneurs alike"--

This open access book investigates how digitalization and service infusion are changing service provision and the customer experience. It highlights the central role of service management and service innovation in making these changes not only appear in theory but also implementing them in business practice. At the beginning of the 21st century, many manufacturing firms struggled to exploit the financial potential of service businesses, a phenomenon described as the service paradox. While many manufacturing firms are still struggling with this paradox, several firms (both service and manufacturing firms) are simultaneously struggling with digitalization. This phenomenon can be viewed as the digitalization paradox, i.e., as a situation in which companies invest in digitalization but struggle to reach the expected revenue growth. By applying the lens of service innovation to digitalization and service infusion, the book showcases how firms can overcome the service and digitalization paradoxes, transform service provision, and improve the customer experience. It offers comprehensive coverage, blending literature reviews, conceptualizations, empirical illustrations, and case studies to offer a multifaceted perspective on corporate strategies, illuminating pathways to address the challenges posed by the service and digitalization paradoxes.

Built on the latest research from the CTF – Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden, this book offers a valuable resource for managers seeking practical strategies and approaches to enhance their understanding and implementation of service management and marketing principles. It will also appeal to academics with an interest in service management and marketing. 

The sharing economy, which is considered a better way of utilizing existing resources, is associated with positive effects not only on the financial aspects of sustainability but also on its environmental and social dimensions. But is this true? Previous research has typically discussed either the positive or negative aspects of the sharing business model in specific contexts. This study adopts a dual perspective regarding the sustainability of sharing business models by critically analyzing the relationship between sharing business models and sustainability. Building on the resource-based view of the firm and practice theory, the current research develops a conceptual framework for evaluating the sustainability of sharing business models at the level of the individual, the firm, and society. Our proposed dual-process model suggests that two competing processes contribute to sustainability. The studys conceptual model and propositions advance theory and provide a research agenda for future empirical studies. This research also provides valuable guidance to managers and policymakers regarding the sustainability of sharing business models, which can inform the business model innovation process.

Service innovation is often viewed as the main source of growth in the modern economy. There is a general agreement that service innovation can provide a positive change for the environment, creating new types of jobs and making consumers’ lives easier. In this chapter, we challenge the positive view and provide arguments against service innovation. While service innovation might seem positive, there are negative effects on the financial development, the social development, and the environment. Service innovations do not replace existing services, but create complementary services and as a consequence most positive effects do not appear, which results in increased use of resources and negative effects on the environment. The lack of critical studies on service innovation has resulted in a flawed and somewhat overpromising picture of service innovations and what they can do.

Publicly funded national science agencies create value as innovation catalysts and through their scientific and research missions, they tackle wicked problems. Understanding how dynamic capabilities and business model innovation enable research-intensive organisations to seize the market in the mission is key to translating bold new science that has impact. We qualitatively explore how Australias national science agency-the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)-has pursued open innovation to support business model-dynamic capabilities in an evolving publicly funded landscape. We reflect on the value of open innovation initiatives that have allowed the CSIRO to ambidextrously pursue world-class science while achieving impact. Points for practitionersDynamic capabilities and business model innovation are strategic tools for publicly funded national science agencies seeking to seize the market in the mission.We examine a case of business model-dynamic capabilities in CSIRO.Open innovation has been important for CSIRO as part of an ambidextrous approach.

This study was based on a comprehensive customer satisfaction survey, a multinational retailer administered to its customers from over 40 countries shopping in over 300 stores, as published in Bolton et al. (2022). The survey data contained 2.4 million responses to about 500 different questions, regarding recent interactions with the retailer, experiences across touchpoints, and customer demographics. Not all customers answered all the questions, being assigned randomly to various modules of the survey. The goal of our research was to investigate how touchpoints moderate the antecedents of customer satisfaction with service encounters by comparing online and in-store encounters. We used a hierarchical linear model (HLM) and found that online customers weigh cognitive and behavioral qualities more heavily, while they weigh emotional and sensorial qualities less heavily than in-store customers. Since firms have limited resources, this research narrows down on key qualities of service encounters, on how qualities should be standardized or customized in global omnichannel environments. Though HLM is an established technique in marketing and business research, using it on a large dataset proved challenging because the observations were nested across customers, stores, and countries, and not all customers interacted with the retailer across all touchpoints. These challenges, combined with the large number of respondents and identification of the relevant variables, increased the technical difficulties. In this methodological case study, we will focus on how to navigate technical difficulties and provide guidelines for researchers struggling with large datasets with nested data for which HLM is the most appropriate technique to analyze data.