Guest editorial: Opportunities and challenges at the crossroads of communication and services

Citation

Lievens, A., Neijens, P. and De Pelsmacker, P. (2022), "Guest editorial: Opportunities and challenges at the crossroads of communication and services", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 33 No. 4/5, pp. 497-506. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-07-2022-489

Introduction

Over the last decades, the contexts of services and communication management have changed dramatically, with a strong impact on the challenges and opportunities of communicating services. Four areas of change can be identified. First of all, society has changed such that communicating services for societal well-being issues has become increasingly important. Second, new actors have entered the service ecosystem, with new communication challenges and opportunities. Third, new communication technologies and formats have become available, or will become available in the near future. Finally, as a consequence of these developments, new types of services-customers interactions have emerged.

Future research will need to explore this changed context and its theoretical ramifications. Classical communication and services theories have become (partly) obsolete and need to be adjusted to this new reality. And, of course, practitioners will need to adapt their strategies and tactics to cope with new challenges and take advantages of opportunities that did not exist before.

This special issue on ‘opportunities and challenges at the crossroads of communication and services’ provides an overview of these phenomena and their consequences for communication in a service context. The issue consists of four parts, one for each of the areas of change identified. Each part consists of five contributions. The first contribution of each part offers an overview of the topic, while the subsequent four articles dig deeper into specific aspects. This special issue will appear in two consecutive issues of the Journal of Service Management. The 20 contributions in this special issue were all written by author teams that were invited by the three guest editors.

In the following sections we give an overview of the contributions in each of the four parts. Each contribution pays attention to the theoretical ramifications of this changing context, offers a future research agenda, and discusses managerial implications. We discuss those in the last three sections.

Communicating services for societal well-being issues

The first section of the special issue is about transformative values in services. It offers contributions in terms of new organizing frameworks for transformative value creation, how to involve customers, key principles of successful transformative value positioning and how environmental, social and governance metrics impact customer perceptions of social innovativeness.

Transformative value is a social dimension of value creation that generates uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of individuals, communities and ecosystems (see also Keränen and Olkkonen, 2022 below). Taking care of people and planet when customers interact with the companies' products/services, employees, technologies and its service delivery network has become increasingly important. Larivière and Smit (2022) introduce the concept of “Service Encounter 3.0” and develop an organizing framework, rooted in the service marketing, branding and communication literature that puts the people-planet-profits concept on the radar of service management. This framework tries to establish why people-planet-profits should be part of a company's strategy, how closing the five gaps identified by the Gaps model can be applied to people-planet-profits and what role people-planet-profits can play in the implementation stage.

Consumers play a central role in the creation of transformative value. Relying on a review of service and communication literature and connecting their insights to real world examples, Bilstein et al. (2022) discuss opportunities and challenges about involving consumers in the ideation, creation and dissemination of transformative value. The authors identify four overarching themes for future research at the intersection of communication and service research, by exploring how customers are engaging in customer innovation, customer participation and customer dissemination behaviors: the voice of the non-customer, protecting vulnerable customers, consumer literacy and word-of-mouth as a double-edged sword.

Tsioutsou and Diehl (2022) posit that the literature suffers from a lack of sound interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks that delineate how transformative value is created in services throughout the service consumption process. They integrate insights from agenda-setting, framing and relational dialectics and transformative service research to develop an integrative framework that examines the nature and role of service communications during the various stages of the service consumption process: the Transformative Value Creation via Service Communications (TVCSC) framework. The proposed framework identifies several research gaps and provides directions for future research directions.

One of the ultimate goals of service management and marketing is to build and increase brand value by means of developing a strong and relevant brand positioning. Transformative value positioning can positively influence brand equity. However, a transformative value positioning may also backfire and damage the brand, because it may be perceived as (green, fem, health, pink, rainbow, […]) ‘washing’. The fourth paper in this section (Leroi-Werelds and Matthes, 2022) integrates insights from service, branding and communication research to present key principles of a successful transformative value positioning for service brands. The authors posit that a successful transformative value positioning is based on the organizational DNA, is consistently implemented in actions, communications, employee behavior and servicescapes (brand touch points), and inspires customer engagement. Based on these premises, this paper formulates key principles of a successful transformative value positioning for service brands and provides a future research agenda.

The final paper in this special issue (Rosengren et al., 2022) concerns a topic that is of key importance for communication in services: how firm's environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics and reporting impact customer perceptions of social innovativeness. The authors report the results of a cross-industry empirical study covering more than 100 firms. They conclude that, while these metrics provide important information for investors and regulators, they are not reflected in customers' perceptions of firms' social innovativeness. The authors state that researchers and managers must advance their knowledge regarding how to better link ESG metrics and reporting to customers' perceptions. They offer a future research agenda that focuses upon when and how to communicate which social innovativeness aspects.

New actors in services communication

This section strives to bridge communication (e.g. public relations) and value proposition literature to generate a better understanding of the ways in which brands and firms can communicate about their ability to share resources in complex ecosystems or networks and the challenges that go along with this communication. Hence, the papers focus on the co-creation of economic, social and environmental value in service ecosystems, wicked problems and the role of public relations, social activism in transformative service research, social media communication and crisis communication.

In the first paper of this section, Verleye and Reber (2022) provide an overview of communication strategies that enable service ecosystem actors to co-create economic, social and/or environmental value. They identify five dilemmas that service ecosystem actors face when communicating about their value package with one another: whether to involve third parties when sending messages about their value package (sender), what information to share about their value package (message), whether to invest resources in face-to-face communication when conveying messages about the value package (channel), whether to reach out to a broad audience with value package messages (receiver) and whether to engage in institutional work through communication in response to various interpretations of messages about the value package (effect). Their conceptualization advances our insight in value co-creation in service ecosystems by unraveling the dilemmas that come along with creating value propositions as strategic communication tools.

Fehrer et al. (2022) focus on wicked problems and how public relations can support societies to tackle them. A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements and its complex and interconnected nature. It has multiple causes and no clear solutions. Examples are ways forward toward fairer economies and better business and strategies to save the planet. They use the service ecosystem design framework to develop a model of service ecosystem shaping for social change, and highlight the important role that PR can play. The model starts from four tasks that PR can fulfill and details the ways in which it can do so: facilitate value cocreation processes between stakeholders, shape institutional arrangements in general and public discourse in particular, provide a platform for recursive feedback loops that enables discourse to ripple through service ecosystems and guide collective shaping efforts by bringing stakeholder concerns and beliefs into the open.

The third paper of this section (Keränen and Olkkonen, 2022) develops the idea of social change further, and highlights the potential of social activism in transformative service research which is aimed at creating uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of individuals, communities and ecosystems. Social activism is a public act that aims to challenge the status quo by bringing alternative views or narratives to the debate. The paper builds upon a review of social activism in the management and communications literature to identify its potential for social change in service (eco) systems. The authors outline three ways in which social activism can influence companies: external activism, internal activism and activism as organizational practice, and develop a research agenda to advance transformative service research by means of social activism.

Ravazzani and Hazée (2022) focus upon multi-stakeholder value co-creation through social media communication. The connected world we live in today has fundamentally changed how actors interact, share resources and co-create value. Drawing on public relation concepts, the authors develop a conceptual framework to assess communication in multistakeholder social media-mediated exchanges, and the challenges that accompany them. They propose six theoretical propositions that predict how service organizations can successfully leverage social media communication to co-create value with multiple stakeholders. These propositions explicitly incorporate a PR communication perspective by building on four influential social media-related theoretical elements: dialog, engagement, social presence and conversational human voice. Building on this framework, the authors develop an extensive research agenda.

Finally, the last paper (Blasco-Arcas et al., 2022) focuses on the specific context of crises in service ecosystems. Building upon crisis communication and service ecosystems research, and through the lens of Rhetorical Arena Theory, the authors present a typology of service crises and analyze and offer new insights into key aspects of crisis communication among different stakeholders in a service ecosystem. The Rhetorical Arena theory is a theory of crisis communication emphasizing the complex and dynamic nature of organizational crises. It is typically interested in studying how organizations in crisis defend their image or reputation applying various types of crisis response strategies. The authors recommend several research lines in order to explore further macro (i.e. the role and interactions between different stakeholders in the event of a crisis) and micro (i.e. individual aspects related to the context, media, genre and text) dimensions and their importance during the communication process.

New technologies and formats in services communications

This section addresses what type of and how new technologies and formats can steer services communication. The papers discuss how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts, service robots and voice assistants, and discuss neuro-enhanced reality as a service communication tool.

Mahr and Huh (2022) in their first article reflect on cutting-edge technologies that transform communication processes and effects and give rise to new formats of services communication. The authors bring together the state-of-the-art research and theory in the communication and service research fields, examine the implications of new technologies for the future of services communication and propose future research directions. As the overarching framework for organizing and synthesizing the articles within this section, the authors apply the “technology affordances” perspective to enhance theoretical conceptualization and research questions formulation. The authors define technological affordances in the services communication context as “a dynamic, multifaceted, relational construct that represents the communicative action possibilities offered by the technologies to enable or constrain certain formats of communications between service providers and customers, as well as among service customers, resulting in specific value creation outcomes”. Finally, based on the affordances perspective the authors develop an overall conceptual framework for depicting the forward looking research field of new technologies and formats in services communication.

One of the most important consequences of the digital transformation is that digital platform users not only consume but also produce communication related to their experiences. Hilken et al. (2022) posit that it remains largely unexplored how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts and potentially create value for themselves, other users, and service providers. Drawing from the literature in communication, service research and interactive marketing, they introduce three communicative affordances (interactivity, visibility and anonymity) as a framework to advance user-created communication in services. Instead of focusing on specific technologies or user behaviors, they propose a holistic perspective of user goals and motivations, use experiences and platform design. Moving beyond the traditional sender–receiver communication framework, they discuss opportunities and challenges for service providers associated with these affordances, and offer affordance-specific research questions and general recommendations for future research.

The next three papers in this section focus upon specific technologies. The first one (Becker et al., 2022) discusses service robots, system-based autonomous and adaptable interfaces that interact, communicate and deliver services to an organization's customers. Although service robots become increasingly important in service industries, critics often point out that they lack emotional communication capabilities without which they cannot be expected to truly replace human employees in service interactions. The authors develop a theoretical framework for the investigation of the role of emotional communication by service robots and its effects on customers and their service experience. This framework is structured around a three-step emotional communication process (i.e. read, decide and express) and four emotional communication strategies crucial for service interactions (i.e. mimicking, alleviating, infusing and preventing). Based on this framework, they propose an interdisciplinary research agenda that will provide further insight into how service robots can add value to service frontlines and engage customers.

Artificial intelligence–enabled voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri are available in smartphones, smart speakers, and other digital devices and channels. A key feature that distinguishes voice assistants from other AI-enabled technology is their capacity to engage in virtual conversations with customers. The fourth paper in this section (Ciuchita et al., 2022) deals with how the communication enabled, and provided by these assistants influence different phases of the customer journey, contingent on how they communicate, what they communicate, and how they are perceived by different users during the service experience. Drawing on Speech Act theory, the Elaboration Likelihood model, Social Information Processing and Social Impact Theory, the authors develop a conceptual framework and five research lines to investigate how various elements of voice assistant – customer interactions (design, humanness, intelligence, source, message and recipient factors) affect service experiences across the prepurchase, purchase and post–purchase stages of the customer journey and ultimately customers' evaluations of and usage intentions relating to voice assistants.

Finally, Grewal et al. (2022) boldly go where few researchers have gone before, and maybe should not. The authors explore neuro-enhanced reality as a novel approach for enhancing service communication between customers, frontline employees and service organizations that extends beyond current reality-enhanced service communication techniques based on augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. Neuro-enhanced technology supports neuro-to-digital and digital-to-neuro communication based on neuroimaging (e.g. controlling digital content through thought) and neurostimulation (e.g. eliciting brain responses based on digital content). This provides a basis for outlining possible innovative forms of service communication. The authors develop a research agenda to guide the future study and managerial implications of neuro-enhanced imaging in service settings, demonstrating how neuroscientific research can be extended from understanding brain activity to generating novel service interactions.

New types of services-customers interactions

The last section focusses on the interaction aspect of specific technologies and the ways in which these platforms alter customers' service interactions or enable new types of interactions. The following papers therefore elaborate upon recommender systems, conversational agents, the role of proximity in omnichannel systems, brand communities and brand purpose and non-profit service disintermediation.

The first contribution (Malthouse et al., 2022) gives an overview of how recommender systems, a new type of services-customers interaction, can contribute to customer engagement. Customer engagement is a central concept in today's marketing theory and practice. It represents consumers' investment of cognitive, emotional and behavioral resources in their interactions with brands or companies, and it is driven by consumers' experiences with objects in terms of their personal goals. One of these objects can be recommender systems. These are software tools and techniques providing suggestions for items to be relevant to a user. They often provide a service to customers by helping them find relevant items. The core question the article addresses is how to bridge the gap between technologists who develop these systems and marketing professionals who want to use the tool to enhance customer engagement. The authors develop a new conceptual framework in which recommender system design is an antecedent of recommender systems perceptions and use. The latter, in turn, determines recommender platform engagement, with downstream effects on customer brand or company engagement. The authors also provide a measurement system that allows to empirically testing their framework.

Blažević and Sidaoui (2022) focus upon conversational agents, another software tool that is increasingly used in a service context. A conversational agent, usually in the form of Internet chatbots or portable devices, is an interactive customer communication technology, a dialog system to converse with a human that conducts natural language processing and responds automatically using human language. It processes and employs text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures or other modes for communication for both input and output. Conversational agents are expected to reduce costs and improve service. However, in practice, they do not always live up to these expectations. The authors develop TRISEC, a new conceptual model as guidance for optimizing conversational agent design. It integrates the service logic, technology design and customer experience triad to examine the implementation of conversational agent solutions and they argue that the balance between these three angles is different for different types of services, i.e. search, experience and credence contexts.

The third paper in this section (Dalla Pozza, 2022) broadens the perspective of how to communicate with customers through proximity (defined as a subjective experience representing the degree of closeness or remoteness an individual cocreates with stimuli in their environment), as the central service concept in an omnichannel system. The latter encompasses not only the distribution channels through which manufacturers' products reach the customer, but also the communication channels therein. In contemporary omnichannel systems, digital touchpoints have increased distance among customers and companies. The author claims that a successful omnichannel system is able to build proximity among the involved parties during interactions at the different touchpoints, and in that way strengthen a seamless, holistic and coherent customer journey experience. The paper emphasizes the importance of an omnichannel seamless interaction experience (OSIE), the dimensions of which are consistency, freedom in channel selection, and synchronization across channels. The customer experience is the overall result of consumers' accumulated interactions with the system over time. The author proposes a measurement approach for customer experience in an omnichannel system, based on insights from the service logic, psychological distance theory and the omnichannel literature, with proximity as the central focus.

The ultimate purpose of service communication is to increase brand value. Calder (2022) focuses upon how brand communities and brand purpose can be used in customer interactions to build strong brands. A brand community is a community formed on the basis of attachment to a brand. It is a place where people who have an emotional connection to a brand can connect with each other and with the brand. Life Purpose Brand Communities involve life goals and values to which a consumer personally aspires. Societal Purpose Brand Communities involve societal goals that a consumer desires for the good of others. The author argues that appealing to these purposes – by means of well-targeted communication and customer interactions in brand communities – can increase engagement with the brand, both by customers and non-customer stakeholders. This engagement improves brand experience and increases brand value for both the company and its stakeholders.

‘Nonprofit service disintermediation’ is the central concept of the final paper in this section. Mitchell and Clark (2022) address the service management challenges of non-profit service disintermediation for nonprofit organizations as this refers to the disconnect between their services beneficiaries and funders, an environment that is fundamentally different from other service contexts. The authors outline the inadequacies of popular communication frameworks to understand the new reality of customer-service organization engagement in the digital age. Through adopting this customer engagement lens, they develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication. The paper identifies nine characteristics of new nonprofit service and communication interactions, and proposes new types of customer service interactions to bring together service donors and service recipients through innovative digital communication.

Theoretical contributions

Interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives are central in the 20 contributions to this special issue on opportunities and challenges at the crossroads of communication and services. The authors draw upon literature and approach in a variety of disciplines and integrate different theories and disciplines. In particular insights are used from literature on service ecosystems, customer engagement, and research on transformative service value, people-planet-profits, service value co-creation, (digital) communication, multi-stakeholder contexts, branding, purpose and customer journey. Authors draw upon frameworks from fields and theories as diverse as service-customer interaction, service marketing, technology design, customer service experience, omnichannel, public relations, social activism, emotional communication, communicative affordances, agenda setting, framing, relational dialectics, servicescapes, social innovativeness, Psychological Distance Theory, Rhetorical Arena Theory, Speech Act Theory, the Elaboration Likelihood model, Social Information Processing, Social Impact theory and the GAPs model of Service Management.

In doing so, the authors extend and improve existing frameworks and in some cases develop completely new ones, such as TRISEC, that integrates service logic, technology design and customer experience to examine the implementation of conversational agent solutions in search, experience and credence service contexts; a technology affordances perspective; Service encounter 3.0.; and the TVCSC model. Others develop or use specific measurement instruments, such as proximity measures for customer experience in an omnichannel system and ESG metrics.

Several contributions focus on specific communication tools, such as recommender systems, conversational agents, AI-enabled voice assistants, service robots, brand communities, user-created communication and neuro-enhanced reality. Finally, a number of papers focus upon specific application domains, amongst which non-profit organizations, wicked problems and crisis communication.

Directions for further research

All papers offer extensive directions for future research. Several authors propose further research ideas on how communication can increase the value of service brands to consumers, enabling service ecosystem actors to contribute to co-creating value, by formulating evidence-based guidelines for service ecosystem actors at the crossroads of service management and communication. Authors also develop research ideas on how to extend the life cycle of service brands, and the importance of user-created content affordances in this process. Other papers focus on a further exploration of how the digital landscape creates new opportunities for brand communication to build customer engagement and -more particularly-social media communication to co-create value with multiple stakeholders and the importance of further research into macro (i.e. the role and interactions between different stakeholders) and micro (i.e. individual aspects related to context, media, genre and text) dimensions and their importance during the communication process in times of crisis.

Several authors develop a research agenda regarding the key principles of a successful transformative value positioning for service brands, and how transformative value is created through the various communications in services. Additionally, research ideas are developed about how to involve consumers in the ideation, creation and dissemination of transformative value by engaging in customer innovation, customer participation and customer dissemination behaviors. Attention is also devoted to the role of public relations in the shaping of service ecosystems for social change, and the potential of social activism in transformative service research.

Another set of future research ideas focuses upon new communication technologies and formats, such as recommender systems, customer engagement interface and emotional communication by service robots and their effects on customers and their service experience. A future research agenda is also proposed through a technology affordances lens, with respect to the optimization of conversational agent design and implementation in interactive customer communication technologies, how voice assistants' communications will impact customers' evaluations and usage of these assistants. Neuroscientific research is proposed to conceptualize innovative forms of service communication.

Managerial implications

Finally, all authors mention managerial implications of their work. First of all, several of them illustrate their point by giving examples in various industries and inspiring real-life insights of companies and brands, such as IKEA, Google, Amazon, Apple, Nike, GreenKayak, Hilton, Marriott, Blackrock, H&M, Panera Bread, Morning Brew, Volkwagen Beetle, Shangri-La, Vodafone, Sotheby, Orange, Akzo Nobel, Ecotricity, Lightstay and Royal Bank of Canada.

The managerially relevant insights for improving communication practices include, for instance, actors to consider who to involve in sending messages about the value they offer, what to emphasize in the value package message, what means to use to convey the message, who to target, and how to deal with the effects, also in times of crisis. The papers also focus upon the role of brand purpose, brand communities and social media to co-create value with multiple stakeholders and to increase the value of service brands, and on how taking user-created content affordances into account can improve service practice.

Several authors also present research questions aiming at recommendations for managers striving for transformative service management and communication. How can firms set their transformative corporate agendas through their dialectics with consumers, society and media? What are the opportunities and challenges on how to involve consumers in the ideation, creation, and dissemination of transformative value? How can social activism influence companies' attempts to drive social change? How can PR play its role in facilitating value cocreation processes between broad sets of stakeholders that drive positive social change?

Several papers develop ideas about tactics, strategies and challenges for managing, facilitating and leveraging novel communication technologies and formats, such as recommender systems, voice assistants and service robots. These technologies offer the potential for communications among various actors in the services domain to become more diverse and highly efficient, thereby transcending time and space. While service users and providers use these novel technologies to store, exchange, retrieve and analyze increasingly amounts of information at a rapidly decreasing velocity and costs, the question remains how service managers can use them to enhance customer engagement and optimize technology design while maintaining a balance between customer centricity on the one hand, and implementation complexity and costs in different service contexts on the other.

Finally, authors point at the managerial importance of key managerial metrics, such as proximity in an omnichannel context with a mix of online and offline touch points, and a more efficient use of environmental, social and governance metrics to improve customer perceptions.