CSM (Centre for Service Management) is pleased to announce that a special section on design and decision making for customer experience (CE) has been published in the prestigious Journal of Business Research (JBR).

A total of 9 papers emerged from a 2-day invitational paper writing workshop that took place between 17th and 19th of June 2008 at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS). The event was a collaboration between the “Customer Management Leadership Group (CMLG)”, Executive Education and the Management Science and Marketing Division at AMBS and CSM. The event was a big success and brought together 60 participants from 11 countries and company representatives from five companies in the retail, power, rail and logistics industries.

Event co-organiser Prof Thorsten Gruber, Director of CSM, said “It was a great experience working together excellent academics from so many countries as well as representatives from leading service companies. I think we learned a lot from each other and collaboration events like this workshop are vital to jointly do research that then has both academic and business impact”. 

The papers in the JBR special section discuss the role of technology (AI and big data) in CE research, reveal atypical CE (vulnerability, deviance behaviours and service failure and recovery) and focus on important organizational and B2B issues (business model innovation, and CEM in business markets) as well.

The papers co-written by CSM members are:

Jamie Burton, Thorsten Gruber, and Anders Gustafsson 

Fostering collaborative research for customer experience – Connecting academic and practitioner worlds

Nancy V. Wünderlich, Jens Hogreve, Ilma Nur Chowdhury, Hannes Fleischer, Sahar Mousavi, Julia Rötzmeier-Keuper, and Rui Sousa

Overcoming vulnerability: Channel design strategies to alleviate vulnerability perceptions in customer journeys

Paul W. Fombelle, Clay M. Voorhees, Mason R. Jenkins, Karim Sidaoui, Sabine Benoit, Thorsten Gruber, Anders Gustafsson, and Ibrahim Abosag

Customer deviance: A framework, prevention strategies, and opportunities for future research

Vicky Story, Judy Zolkiewski, Katrien Verleye, Amin Nazifi, Claire Hannibal, Anthony Grimes, and Liliane Abboud

Stepping out of the shadows: Supporting actors’ strategies for managing end-user experiences in service ecosystems

Thomas L. Baker, Simos Chari, Ahmad Daryanto, Julija Dzenkovska, Kemefasu Ifie, Bryan A. Lukas, and Gianfranco Walsh

Discount venture brands: Self-congruity and perceived value-for-money?

Timothy Keiningham, Lerzan Aksoy, Helen L.Bruce, Fabienne Cadet, Natasha Clennell, Ian R. Hodgkinson, and Treasa Kearney

Customer experience driven business model innovation

The whole special section (“Design and Decision Making for Customer Experience at the Academic-Practitioner Interface”) can be found here.