Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services systems’ capacity to cope with testing, treatment and containment of the virus. Drawing on the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of meaning as a relevant but missing link in understanding the building blocks of service innovation informed by service-dominant (S-D) logic. In exploring the role of meaning in service innovation, especially related to new value...

Purpose: Prior studies have mainly attributed customer incivility to dispositional characteristics, whereas little attention has been paid to exploring service employees' role in triggering or reducing customer incivility. The purpose of the present study is to propose and test a model in which...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a process model for the role transformation of vulnerable consumers through support services. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on four years of participant observation at a community-based support service and in-depth interviews...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the practices used by service providers to manage the customer service experience (CSE) across multiple phases of the customer journey in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. Design/methodology/approach: This study comprises an ethnography that...

Purpose: This article demonstrates that the type of service setting and the first interaction with an employee influences the customers' intention to stay or leave during an unsatisfactory service encounter, and that these effects are mediated by social lock-in, which describes the perception...

Purpose: This study aims to provide empirically generated insights into the drivers of guardianship behaviour among frontline service employees (FLEs) within retail settings. Design/methodology/approach: The research framework comprises a quantitative survey of 507 frontline service employees...