果冻传媒

| |

The service encounter is where the tyre meets the road. In the interaction with a firm鈥檚 employee(s) or technological interface(s), customers shape their attitudes towards the products and services of the firm. As positive customer experiences lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions towards the company, creating high-quality service encounters is crucial for firms to be successful in the market.

Today鈥檚 service encounter is increasingly dominated by technology. Especially developments in artificial intelligence (AI) enable smart, customized service experiences that are available 24/7. For instance, hotels now implement check-in and luggage service robots, call centers are staffed by voicebots and chatbots, and health care providers empower patients in their treatment with wearable trackers. Although such technologies may provide customers more control over the service, they also dramatically change the relationship between customer and firm. This raises questions such as: Why and when do customers adopt these innovations? Do these technologies benefit or harm the value offered by the firm? How do employees and technology jointly deliver the best service for customers? I focus on answering these and other relevant questions. 

Firms also embed AI and algorithms in their products and services to make them 鈥渟mart鈥�. Service engineers now face copying machines that autonomously determine their optimal settings, service support employees operate on digital twins to offer remote maintenance of lithography machines, field service engineers wear hololenses and use augmented reality for faster and more accurate problem diagnosis, and financial advisors now collaborate with AI to realize 鈥渃ollaborative intelligence鈥� in offering loans and other products to customers. How does this affect employees? Do they adopt these innovations? How can they use these technologies to perform better services? Do they still take responsibility for their work outcomes? Are they still being challenged and motivated by the problems they see, or does AI 鈥渟hut them off鈥�? This is another research direction in which I specialize.

I am a quantitative service marketing scholar, focused on the digitalization and robotization of frontline services and in particular the psychological responses of employees and customers to these transformations.