ServiceFriday: Your Customers Received Less Than They Expected – How Much Will it Cost to Recover?

When flights are cancelled or a noisy party disturbs hotel guests, financial compensation is an effective and often-used salve to sooth aggrieved customers. Still, some firms try to avoid paying compensation, while others pay too little or not enough to achieve the customer satisfaction impact they seek. A new paper in the Journal of Service Research dissects service recovery, arming service managers with a more nuanced way of analyzing compensation size the next time they need to assuage customers.

How to Create Customer Delight and Does It Really Drive Loyalty? An Examination of Customer Delight in a B2B Context (New)

Lili Wenli Zou, University of Hong Kong
Chi Kin (Bennett) Yim, University of Hong Kong
Kimmy Wa Chan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Delivering Bad News to Customers: The Roles of Employee Emotional and Technical Competencies in Emotionally Charged Service Encounters

Cécile Delcourt, University of Liege, Belgium
Dwayne D. Gremler, Bowling Green State University
Allard C. R. van Riel, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Marcel van Birgelen, Radboud University, The Netherlands

Building Business-to-Business Relationships with Service

It’s common knowledge that service is crucial to creating long-term relationships with your customers, but are there any special rules for business-to-business service providers? Do you treat all customers the same, or do they respond differently to services offerings based on individual perceptions and experience? Until now, research has paid little attention to service design in B2B relationships. But a new piece of research by Dr. Ruth N. Bolton, Vanderbilt University, Amy K.

Customizing Services through Employee Adaptiveness

As strategies move from targeting the “mass market” to “molecular market,” more companies are focusing on providing individualized solutions for their customers. This customization trend crosses many lines of business, but for services, execution can be more complex. That is because front-line employees are at the heart of the service delivery, and they are also responsible for the customization. Although the employee’s role is more critical than ever, very little about their roles and behaviors in the customization process has been explored in past research.

Using Data to Look Out for Customers

Some companies responded to the cascade of threats and challenges of the past year by turning inward. The long game for those firms will be more exposure during future shocks because they learned little about their environment this time.

Service in a Time of Rapid Change: Edward Jones – Keeping it Personal One Client at a Time

Edward Jones works with its clients to build portfolios that are based on client goals and timelines. Building personal relationships one at a time is at the core of the work of its 19,000 financial advisors for more than 7 million clients throughout North America.

Service in a Time of Rapid Change: Under Stress – Break or Change

Months before the U.S. woke up to the threat of COVID-19, Ron Zielinski was hearing about a new kind of pneumonia in China. Zielinski, who leads Global Customer Services for Coherent Inc., heard from one of his managers in Singapore in late December that there were some 12 to 14 of these cases in Wuhan. They agreed to keep an eye on it, he says, and “since then I feel like I’ve had a front row seat to this pandemic unfolding.”

ServiceFriday: Communicating with Customers: Are You Using the Best Method?

The way you convey a message often has more of an effect than the message itself. When we give presentations or speeches, we know that the way we dress, our facial expressions, and our overall confidence are important in captivating an audience. This is just as important in the service industry as well, especially when informing a customer about new innovations, which can lead to a decrease in customer loyalty if not communicated properly.

ServiceFriday: All About Preference: Non-Beneficiary Reactions to Discretionary Preferential Treatment

The green-eyed monster that the character Iago described in Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy is really a metaphor for the building jealousy of Iago’s “friend” Othello. That green-eyed monster has a close cousin (the blue-toed beast?) known as envy. A common way envy enters one’s life is by observing preferential treatment given to others, specifically like the discretionary preferential treatment (DPT) often found in the hospitality industry.