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•This manuscript draws attention to the dawn of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) and highlights its potential for addressing a host of issues within retail and service domains.•The authors outline a 2 × 2 framework that categorizes retailers and service providers by their embrace of human–machine collaborations, a key aspect of the 5IR.•The authors outline the 5IR's expanded definition of stakeholders (companies, employees, customers, and society); the merging of digital, physical, and biological technologies in the 5IR promises enhanced well-being for societal actors across the board.•This article establishes a roadmap for how a retail/service (r)evolution is likely to progress and offers a set of key research questions that emerge as a result. This manuscript draws attention to the dawn of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) and highlights its potential for addressing a host of issues within retail and service domains. With a retailing and service perspective, the authors outline the meaning of the 5IR, according to a 2 × 2 framework that categorizes retailers and service providers by their embrace of human–machine collaborations. They also propose an expanded definition of stakeholders in the 5IR (companies, employees, customers, and society). Merging digital, physical, and biological technologies promises enhanced well-being for societal actors across the board. By outlining these likely implications of the 5IR for retailing and services, this article establishes a roadmap for how the (r)evolution is likely to progress and offers a set of key research questions that emerge as a result. [Display omitted]

First and foremost, I believe it is important to distinguish clearly between “customer [support] service” [singular] and “customer support services” [plural], a distinction that at times gets blurred when the terms are used interchangeably. [...]the provision of customer service as well as the delivery of products and services (including CSS) are increasingly being handled by service ecosystems, each consisting of multiple distinct organizations that are interlinked is some fashion to cater to the same focal customers. [...]the notion of understanding and managing customer experience throughout the entire customer journey – from pre-purchase to during purchase/consumption to post-purchase – is garnering growing attention in both business and scholarly literatures.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emerging crowd-funding phenomenon, that is a collective effort by consumers who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet, in order to invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Successful service businesses that organize crowd-funding and act as intermediaries are emerging, attesting to the viability of this means of attracting investment.Design methodology approach - The research employs a \"grounded theory\" approach, performing an in-depth qualitative analysis of three cases involving crowd-funding initiatives: SellaBand in the music business, Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in non-profit services. These cases were selected to represent a diverse set of crowd-funding operations that vary in terms of risk return for the investor and the type of payoff associated to the investment.Findings - The research addresses two research questions: how and why do consumers turn into crowd-funding participants? and how and why do service providers set up a crowd-funding initiative? Concerning the first research question, the authors' findings reveal purposes, characteristics, roles and tasks, and investment size of crowd-funding activity from the consumer's point of view. Regarding the second research question, the authors' analysis reveals purposes, service roles, and network effects of crowd-funding activity investigated from the point of view of the service organization that set up the initiative.Practical implications - The findings also have implications for service managers interested in launching and or managing crowd-funding initiatives.Originality value - The paper addresses an emerging phenomenon and contributes to service theory in terms of extending the consumer's role from co-production and co-creation to investment.

The role of technology in customer-company interactions and the number of technology-based products and services have been growing rapidly. Although these developments have benefited customers, there is also evidence of increasing customer frustration in dealing with technology-based systems. Drawing on insights from the extant literature and extensive qualitative research on customer reactions to technology, this article first proposes the construct of technology readiness of people and discusses its conceptualization. It then describes a program of research that was undertaken to operationalize the construct, develop and refine a multiple-item scale to measure it, and assess the scale’s psychometric properties. The article concludes with a discussion of potential practical applications of the scale and an agenda for additional research aimed at deepening our understanding of technology’s role in marketing to and serving customers.

Retailers, such as Starbucks and Victoria's Secret, aim to provide customers a great experience across channels. In this paper we provide an overview of the existing literature on customer experience and expand on it to examine the creation of a customer experience from a holistic perspective. We propose a conceptual model, in which we discuss the determinants of customer experience. We explicitly take a dynamic view, in which we argue that prior customer experiences will influence future customer experiences. We discuss the importance of the social environment, self-service technologies and the store brand. Customer experience management is also approached from a strategic perspective by focusing on issues such as how and to what extent an experience-based business can create growth. In each of these areas, we identify and discuss important issues worthy of further research.

PurposeResponding to an increasing call for a more comprehensive conceptualization of customer delight, the purpose of this paper is to expand the theory of customer delight and to examine the implications of such an expanded view for service theory and practice.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents the results of three qualitative studies. The first study explores customer delight through self-reported consumption experiences in customer-selected contexts, followed by one-on-one in-depth interviews. The second involves focus groups and the third examines self-reported incidents of delightful customer experiences.FindingsThis research finds that customer delight goes beyond extreme satisfaction and joy and surprise to include six properties that—individually or in combination—characterize customer delight. An expanded conceptualization of how customer delight can be defined is proposed in which customer delight is associated with various combinations of six properties – the customer experiencing positive emotions, interacting with others, successful problem-solving, engaging customer’s senses, timing of the events and sense of control that characterizes the customer's encounter.Research limitations/implicationsIt is clear from the findings of this research that there is no single property that is associated with delight. Through the facilitation of multiple properties, managers have the potential to create a multitude of routes to delight. It is recommended that future research (1) identify and explicate these alternative routes for engendering delight using the six properties identified, and (2) develop a general typology based on service context and characteristics, customer segment, etc. that further stimulates scholarship on delight, and offers more industry-specific insights for managers.Practical implicationsInsights from this investigation will encourage managers and service designers to think more broadly and creatively about delight. Doing so will open up new opportunities for achieving customer delight, beyond merely focusing on extreme satisfaction or surprise and joy strategies currently dominating discussions of customer delight.Originality/valueThis paper makes several contributions to the service literature. First, it extends current conceptualizations of customer delight and offers an expanded definition. Next, it demonstrates how this new understanding extends the existing literature on delight. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future delight research and discusses managerial implications, opening up new opportunities for firms to design delightful customer experiences.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the cross-cultural validity of the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) (Parasuraman, 2000) and explore how demographics and attitudinal variables may help to explain adoption and use of technology-based products and services. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on surveys conducted with probabilistic samples from two culturally distant countries, the USA and Chile. Findings Results support the TRI's cross-cultural validity. They also suggest that demographic variables do matter when explaining people's willingness to adopt new technology, with education being the most consistent predictor. Moreover, some of the findings seem to challenge the attitude-behavior consistency implied by conventional theory - while attitudinal variables are better predictors of pro-technological behavior in the USA, with technology-related insecurity being the most important of four attitudinal dimensions included in the analysis, demographic variables perform as better predictors in Chile, with educational level outperforming age and gender. Originality/value This is the first-ever cross-cultural test of the TRI using actual consumer samples from two culturally very different countries.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to review what we know - and don't know - about Generation Y's use of social media and to assess the implications for individuals, firms and society.Design methodology approach - The paper distinguishes Generation Y from other cohorts in terms of systematic differences in values, preferences and behavior that are stable over time (as opposed to maturational or other differences). It describes their social media use and highlights evidence of intra-generational variance arising from environmental factors (including economic, cultural, technological and political legal factors) and individual factors. Individual factors include stable factors (including socio-economic status, age and lifecycle stage) and dynamic, endogenous factors (including goals, emotions, and social norms).The paper discusses how Generation Y's use of social media influences individuals, firms and society. It develops managerial implications and a research agenda.Findings - Prior research on the social media use of Generation Y raises more questions than it answers. It: focuses primarily on the USA and or (at most) one other country, ignoring other regions with large and fast-growing Generation Y populations where social-media use and its determinants may differ significantly; tends to study students whose behaviors may change over their life cycle stages; relies on self-reports by different age groups to infer Generation Y's social media use; and does not examine the drivers and outcomes of social-media use. This paper's conceptual framework yields a detailed set of research questions.Originality value - This paper provides a conceptual framework for considering the antecedents and consequences of Generation Y's social media usage. It identifies unanswered questions about Generation Y's use of social media, as well as practical insights for managers.

In a study, the authors first propose a simple model summarizing the key drivers of customer loyalty. Then, on the basis of this model and drawing on key insights from the preceding research, they outline a set of issues for further research related to the quality-value-loyalty chain. Next, the authors help develop a conceptual framework that integrates the quality-value-loyalty chain with the \"pyramid model,\" which emphasizes the increasing importance of technology-customer, technology-employee, and technology-company linkages in serving customers. Using this integrated framework as a springboard, they identify a number of avenues for additional inquiry pertaining to the 3 types of linkages.

Using the means-end framework as a theoretical foundation, this article conceptualizes, constructs, refines, and tests a multiple-item scale (E-S-QUAL) for measuring the service quality delivered by Web sites on which customers shop online. Two stages of empirical data collection revealed that two different scales were necessary for capturing electronic service quality. The basic E-S-QUAL scale developed in the research is a 22-item scale of four dimensions: efficiency, fulfillment, system availability, and privacy. The second scale, E-RecS-QUAL, is salient only to customers who had nonroutine encounters with the sites and contains 11 items in three dimensions: responsiveness, compensation, and contact. Both scales demonstrate good psychometric properties based on findings from a variety of reliability and validity tests and build on the research already conducted on the topic. Directions for further research on electronic service quality are offered. Managerial implications stemming from the empirical findings about E-S-QUAL are also discussed.