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This paper aims to examine the psychological consequences of a customer engagement initiative through referral reward programs (RRPs) in online versus offline environments.

The authors conducted a qualitative study followed by a scenario-based experimental study.

The authors show that recommenders’ concern about how they are viewed by recommendation recipients (i.e. their metaperception) mediates the effects of incentives on referral likelihood in both offline and online environments. However, metaperception has a stronger effect offline where recommenders show higher impression management concerns compared to online. Furthermore, tie-strength and communication environment moderate the effect of incentives on metaperception. When referrals are made to weak-ties, incentives decrease metaperception favorability offline more than online. For strong-ties, this effect is lower, and it is similar in offline and online environments.

The study focused on an online versus offline dyadic communication and did not consider the differences among social media. Furthermore, the authors did not consider how other forms of positive metaperception, like being seen as helpful or knowledgeable, could be increased in an online incentivized referral context. It is possible that a recommender thinks others see him as more helpful or knowledgeable online because a lot more useful information and other resources could be offered here compared to offline communications.

The authors recommend managers to design both online and offline RRPs that minimize metaperception concerns; target strong ties in any communication environment as metaperception concerns are low; and target weak ties online where metaperception concerns are muted.

This work is the first to examine how recommenders’ psychological responses differ offline and online.

What role do consumers play in constructing their own luxury experiences? Challenging the dominant product-focus in luxury conceptualizations, this research note conceptualizes agentic luxury in the context of luxury services. Drawing on extant luxury research, the purpose of this article is to develop how consumers may take on more active roles in enacting their own luxury services experiences.

This research note is conceptual but builds on managerial insights from the luxury service sector to conceptualize the concept of agentic luxury.

Our research note develops a conceptual definition of agentic luxury and provides seven research propositions for its impact on luxury service encounters. These propositions detail how consumers engage in constructing their luxury experience; the roles of consumers and luxury service providers in the experience; and boundary conditions of agentic luxury. The authors further develop the role of customer-as-designer and highlight similarities and differences for agentic luxury between luxury goods and services.

The authors combine the recognized specificities of the largely goods-dominated luxury sector with service research to show how luxury service providers can engage customers for more complete and engaging luxury service experiences.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research note is the first to conceptualize agentic luxury. The authors show how agentic luxury fills a gap in the current literature, and our propositions advance the relevance of agentic luxury for luxury service research.

Empirical research presents conflicting findings with regards to the effectiveness of referral reward programs (RRPs) and supports two alternative and conflicting views on the effectiveness of incentivizing recommendations. They are, first, a positive effect via perceived attractiveness of the incentive, and second, a negative effect via metaperception of the recommendation. The purpose of this paper is to examine these two opposing psychological mechanisms to reconcile the conflicting findings.

The authors conducted three experiments. Study 1 tests the base model. Studies 2 and 3 add moderators to test whether each mediating variable operates exclusively on its intended relationship.

Incentive size enhanced the attractiveness of an incentive, but reduced the metaperception favorability of the recommendation. These two opposing mechanisms operated in parallel, independently and fully mediated the effects of incentive size to likelihood of making a recommendation. Thus, the net impact of incentives on recommendation behavior depended on the relative strengths of these two opposing forces.

The study recommends managers to design RRPs with incentives that recommenders perceive as highly useful (i.e. to increase attractiveness) but have a low face value (i.e. to reduce metaperception concerns) and to target RRPs to strong rather than weak ties.

Our work offers an integrated theoretical account of consumers’ responses to incentivized recommendations and provides managerially relevant guidelines for the design of effective RRPs.

This study aims to show how major service developments in China, India and Singapore offer different perspectives on how cost-effective service excellence (CESE) can be achieved in health care. Resulting research opportunities are highlighted.

The study is based on the authors’ in-depth experience in these three countries.

Digital platforms and related technologies seem more advanced in China than in most western economies in terms of their application, user acceptance and market penetration. The resulting digital ecosystem enabled innovation that provides CESE in digital health care. Second, India benefitted from a large health care market without excessive regulation, litigation risks and interlocking stakeholders. These allowed a number of organizations to achieve CESE through new business models and frugal innovation. Likewise, Singapore is a global leader in health outcomes while it also has one of the lowest health care cost per capita. This is achieved through focus on costs and productivity, standardization and digitization while being intensely focused on health outcomes and the patient experience.

The three countries stand out in the ways they achieved CESE in health care and offer interesting research opportunities. China has fully integrated digital platforms with rapid innovation capabilities, India has extremely high volumes that met focused service factory and frugal service innovation approaches, and Singapore is a tightly controlled health care market with high levels of discipline, both facilitated by its culture and small size. These markets invite research to explore their successes in more depth and deduct lessons for CESE in health care elsewhere.

Together, the author team has decades of managerial, executive teaching and research experience related to service in Asia. The observations and reflections in this study originate from this unique perspective.

Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guiding future research.

We analyzed the literature on service robots as they relate to customers and employees in business journals listed in the Financial Times top 50 journals plus all journals covered in the cross-disciplinary SERVSIG literature alerts.

The analysis of the identified studies yielded multiple observations about the impact of service robots on customers (e.g. overarching frameworks on acceptance and usage of service robots; characteristics of service robots and anthropomorphism; and potential for enhanced and deteriorated service experiences) and service employees (e.g. employee benefits such as reduced routine work, enhanced productivity and job satisfaction; potential negative consequences such as loss of autonomy and a range of negative psychological outcomes; opportunities for human–robot collaboration; job insecurity; and robot-related up-skilling and development requirements). We also conclude that current research on service robots is fragmented, is largely conceptual in nature and focused on the initial adoption stage. We feel that more research is needed to build an overarching theory. In addition, more empirical research is needed, especially on the long(er)-term usage service robots on actual behaviors, the well-being and potential downsides and (ethical) risks for customers and service employees.

Our review focused on the business and service literature. Future work may want to include additional literature streams, including those in computer science, engineering and information systems.

This article is the first to synthesize the business and service literature on the impact of service robots on customers and employees.

Referral reward programs (RRPs) incentivize existing customers (inductors) to refer new customers (inductees). The effectiveness of RRPs is not well understood as previous studies either focused on referral intent and/or ignored inductee responses. However, an RRP is only effective if inductors recommend and inductees respond with buying the service. The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers of existing customers’ successful referral behavior.

This study combines a bank’s customer relationship management (CRM) data which were used to identify successful inductors and non-inductors. Then, observed behavioral and customer background data from the CRM database (including successful referrals, deposits in euros, number of products held, relationship duration, income, age, and gender) were combined with survey data capturing attitudinal variables (i.e. perceived relationship quality, reward attractiveness, referral metaperception, opportunism, and involvement). This approach allowed for the simultaneous testing of all hypothesized drivers of successful referral behavior.

Metaperception (i.e. the process by which individuals determine the impressions other might form of them and their behavior) was the strongest and most significant driver of successful RRP participation, followed by attractiveness of the reward. That is, inductors recommended successfully when they believed that their incentivized referral did not look bad (or even looked good) and incentives were perceived as attractive. This finding is important as metaperception so far has only been examined in theoretical and experimental studies with intent as dependent variables. Second, latent class analysis (LCA) revealed that there were two segments of inductors of which one was opportunistic. Opportunism as a driver of referral behavior has not been shown in past research using more traditional analyses, whereas LCA uncovered it as a driver for one-third of all respondents.

The findings offer managers a better understanding of the key determinants of successful referral behavior with important RRP design implications that counter frequent practice (e.g. designing RRPs with high face value but then reducing its usefulness through terms and conditions). Furthermore, managers may consider segment-specific reward structures to improve the effectiveness of their RRPs.

This study is the first to examine inductor determinants of successful referral behavior and identify inductor segments.

Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.

This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.

Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.

This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.

The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper aims to examine recent streams of service research that have promising implications and research opportunities for B2B marketing.

Together, the author team has decades of research, managerial and executive teaching experience related to B2B marketing and services marketing and management. The observations and reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective and are supplemented by insights from 16 expert interviews.

The authors identify and discuss in this paper four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate B2B research and practice. First, the authors highlight the implications for capturing value in economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, the authors explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization, which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs and build strategic partnerships. The authors explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where the authors derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

This paper is based on the unique perspective of the author team and a panel of experts and connects major streams of service research to the B2B literature.

Extant research mainly focused on potentially negative customer responses to service robots. In contrast, this study is one of the first to explore a service context where service robots are likely to be the preferred service delivery mechanism over human frontline employees. Specifically, the authors examine how customers respond to service robots in the context of embarrassing service encounters.

This study employs a mixed-method approach, whereby an in-depth qualitative study (study 1) is followed by two lab experiments (studies 2 and 3).

Results show that interactions with service robots attenuated customers' anticipated embarrassment. Study 1 identifies a number of factors that can reduce embarrassment. These include the perception that service robots have reduced agency (e.g. are not able to make moral or social judgements) and emotions (e.g. are not able to have feelings). Study 2 tests the base model and shows that people feel less embarrassed during a potentially embarrassing encounter when interacting with service robots compared to frontline employees. Finally, Study 3 confirms that perceived agency, but not emotion, fully mediates frontline counterparty (employee vs robot) effects on anticipated embarrassment.

Service robots can add value by reducing potential customer embarrassment because they are perceived to have less agency than service employees. This makes service robots the preferred service delivery mechanism for at least some customers in potentially embarrassing service encounters (e.g. in certain medical contexts).

This study is one of the first to examine a context where service robots are the preferred service delivery mechanism over human employees.

How can some companies be the innovation leader in their industry over prolonged periods of time, whereas others cannot? The purpose of this study is to understand a firm’s capability to be a successful serial innovator and to generate a constant stream of industry-leading innovations.

The paper uses a longitudinal case study approach to gain an understanding of what and how Singapore Airlines sustained service innovation for over 30 years. The study uses triangulation, whereby the core data from in-depth interviews with senior and middle management and frontline employees were complemented with academic research, case studies, annual reports, observations and archival documents. In total, 240 single-spaced pages of interview transcripts with over 130,000 words were analyzed and coded using MAXQDA for identifying repeated patterns of meaning.

The authors identified three key institutional foundations for service innovation: innovation climate (i.e. leadership and service culture), human capital (i.e. recruitment, training and development and engagement and incentives) and resource configurations (i.e. systems, structure and processes). These foundations enabled the organization to build the following four service innovation-related dynamic capabilities: embrace ambidexterity, institutionalize learning and knowledge integration, orchestrate collaboration and reinvent customer value. Interestingly, these institutional foundations and capabilities remained largely stable across 30 years; what changed were the contexts and specifics, not the foundations and capabilities.

Data were collected only from one company. Because of the method of thematic analysis, the generalizability of the findings needs further investigation.

This study is the first to investigate the drivers of industry-leading sustained service innovation over a prolonged period of time. The proposed framework provides a fuller and more integrated picture of sustained service innovation than past cross-sectional studies.