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This article aims to synthesize and integrate current research on customer experience (CX), identifying the intellectual structure of the field, systematizing a conceptual framework and identifying future research opportunities.

To analyze 629 articles published in peer-reviewed journals in almost four decades, this study employs both bibliometric co-keyword and thematic literature analysis in a complementary way.

This article maps the CX literature by describing its intellectual structure in terms of three research domains (customer, organizational and technological), their corresponding most relevant research themes and topics. Moreover, this study develops a conceptual framework and research propositions to summarize and integrate the CX literature. This work recognizes technology as an important driver for the development of CX research. Lastly, this article provides future research opportunities for moving the field forward, considering an integrative view among domains.

This paper complements other reviews on CX by using a novel methodological approach (co-keyword and thematic analysis) that enables the identification and visualization of the CX intellectual structure. In addition, the study explores the increasing connection between technology and CX research, by raising evidence that technology, by continuously modifying services and consequently CX, has become a transversal component in the research field. These outcomes may be useful for academics and practitioners.

Service design is a multidisciplinary approach that is key to service innovation, as it brings new service ideas to life. In this context, the development of new service design methods and models for creating new service futures is an important stream of service design research. Such developments can benefit from a systematized research methodology that builds on existing knowledge and robustly evaluates the suitability of research contributions. To address this challenge, the purpose of this paper is to present design science research (DSR), an established methodology from the information systems field, and examine how it can be useful for service design research by supporting the development of new artifacts, such as service design constructs, methods and models.

This paper presents DSR and related literature and shows how DSR can support service design research through a step-by-step approach. A methodology to develop prescriptive-driven solutions for classes of problems, DSR can support service design research in developing rigorous and relevant research. One illustrative example of a service design research effort using the DSR approach is presented.

Building on DSR’s robust methodological background, this paper discusses how DSR can support service design research, namely, through the development of new methods and models, and how DSR can be adapted to leverage service design research participatory, iterative, human-centric and creative approach.

This paper provides an overview of DSR and proposes it as a methodology to conduct service design research, offering step-by-step guidance on the application of DSR in service design research and discussing how it can be adapted according to the specific characteristics of service design research and drive future research.

This article provides an in-depth understanding of customer experience with smart services, examines customer perceptual responses to smart and connected service environments and enriches this understanding by outlining how contextual factors (in terms of goals, activities, actors and artifacts) influence the customer experience.

This study adopts a qualitative approach in order to understand customer experience in the smart energy service setting. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 31 participants forming three groups of energy service customers: advanced smart energy (ASE) customers, electric mobility (EM) customers and high-consumption (HC) customers.

The findings show that customer experience with smart services involves a multidimensional set of perceptual responses, comprising specific smart service dimensions (e.g. controllability, visibility, autonomy); relationship dimensions (relationships with the service provider and with the community); and traditional technology-enabled service dimensions (e.g. ease of use, accessibility). The analysis of contextual factors such as goals, activities, actors and artifacts shows that smart services enable a more autonomous experience, wherein customers can integrate a myriad of actors and artifacts and expect the main service provider to support them in taking the lead.

Smart technologies have profoundly changed the service environment, but research on customer experience with smart services is scarce. This study characterizes smart services, provides an in-depth understanding of customer experience in this new context, and discusses relevant implications for management and service research.

Service design is a multidisciplinary approach that plays a key role in fostering service innovation. However, the lack of a comprehensive understanding of its multiple perspectives hampers this potential to be realized. Through an activity theory lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine core areas that inform service design, identifying shared concerns and complementary contributions.

The study involved a literature review in two stages, followed by a qualitative study based on selected focus groups. The first literature review identified core areas that contribute to service design. Based on this identification, the second literature review examined 135 references suggested by 13 world-leading researchers in this field. These references were qualitatively analyzed using the NVivo software. Results were validated and complemented by six multidisciplinary focus groups with service research centers in five countries.

Six core areas were identified and characterized as contributing to service design: service research, design, marketing, operations management, information systems and interaction design. Data analysis shows the various goals, objects, approaches and outcomes that multidisciplinary perspectives bring to service design, supporting them to enable service innovation.

This paper supports service design teams to better communicate and collaborate by providing an in-depth understanding of the multiple contributions they can integrate to create the conditions for new service.

This paper identifies and examines the core areas that inform service design, their shared concerns, complementarities and how they contribute to foster new forms of value co-creation, building a common ground to advance this approach and leverage its impact on service innovation.

Humanity and all life depend on the natural environment of Planet Earth, and that environment is in acute crisis across land, sea and air. One of a set of commentaries on how service can address the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), the authors focus on environmental goals SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 14 (life below water) and SDG 15 (life on land). This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that incorporates the natural environment into transformative services.

The authors trace the evolution of service thinking about the natural environment, from a stewardship perspective of the environment as a set of resources to be managed, through an acknowledgement of nonhuman organisms as actors that can participate in service exchange, towards an emergent concept of ecosystems as integrating human social actors and other biological actors who engage fully in value co-creation.

The authors derive a framework integrating human and other life forms as co-creating actors, drawing on shared natural resources to achieve mutualism, where each actor can have a net benefit from the relationship. Future research questions are posited that may help services research address SDGs 13–15.

The framework integrates ideas from environmental ecosystem literature to inform the nature of ecosystems. By integrating environmental actors and ecological insights into the understanding of service ecosystems, service scholars are well placed to make unique contributions to the global challenge of creating a sustainable future.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of green service. In particular, the focus is on identifying homopathic and heteropathic resource integration processes that preserve or increase the resourceness of the natural ecosystem.

Through an extensive multiple case study involving ten service providers from diverse sectors based on a substantial number of interviews, detailed accounts of green service are provided.

Six resource integration processes were identified: reducing, recirculating, recycling, redistributing, reframing and renewing. While four of these processes are based on homopathic resource integration, both reframing and renewing are based on heteropathic resource integration. While homopathic processes historically constitute a green service by mitigating the impact of consumption on the environment, heteropathic resource integration increases the resourceness of the natural ecosystem through emergent processes and the (re)creation of natural resources.

The present study breaks away from the paradigm that “green service” is about reducing the negative environmental impact of existing services, toward providing a green service that expands biological diversity and other natural resources.

Transformative service research on environmental sustainability is still in its infancy. The present study contributes through conceptualizing green service, redefining existing resource integration processes (reducing, recirculating, recycling) and identifying new resource integration processes (redistributing, reframing, renewing).

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how service design practices reshape mental models to enable innovation. Mental models are actors’ assumptions and beliefs that guide their behavior and interpretation of their environment.

This paper offers a conceptual framework for innovation in service ecosystems through service design that connects the macro view of innovation as changing institutional arrangements with the micro view of innovation as reshaping actors’ mental models. Furthermore, through an 18-month ethnographic study of service design practices in the context of healthcare, how service design practices reshape mental models to enable innovation is investigated.

This research highlights that service design reshapes mental models through the practices of sensing surprise, perceiving multiples and embodying alternatives. This paper delineates the enabling conditions for these practices to occur, such as coaching, diverse participation and supportive physical materials.

This study brings forward the underappreciated role of actors’ mental models in innovation. It highlights that innovation in service ecosystems is not simply about actors making changes to their external context but also actors shifting their own assumptions and beliefs.

This paper offers insights for service managers and service designers interested in supporting innovation on how to catalyze shifts in actors’ mental models by creating the conditions for specific service design practices.

This paper is the first to shed light on the central role of actors’ mental models in innovation and identify the service design practices that reshape mental models.