Experience in Service: Reconstructing an Elusive Concept Through a Multi-Method Triangulation

With a growing shift toward conceptualizing exchange processes through a service lens, practitioners and scholars advocate an increased focus on creating service experience. Given this paradigmatic shift, it is said that customers are looking for service experiences rather than product attributes, which for companies means that service experiences can be a rich source of differentiation. However, although these ideas have become established, there is currently a lack of clarity about the concept of service experience. Thus, the objectives of the dissertation are twofold. First, the elusive nature of service experience is unraveled through a multi-method, multi-perspective research inquiry. Second, the significance of service experience for value co-creation is emphasized. In an effort to accomplish this, the present dissertation is divided into five parts. Part I outlines the philosophical, theoretical and methodological localization of the dissertation and delineates its objectives. Framing the subsequent parts, Part II adopts a meta-perspective to synthesize current concepts of experience. Building on this, Part III takes a provider perspective to elicit current customer experience management practices to inductively develop a customer experience management framework for service. Exploiting the opportunities presented by Self-Tracking Technologies, Part IV adopts a joint perspective to develop a conceptual framework that demonstrates how Self-Tracking Technologies extend the joint realm between provider and customer, implicitly influencing the service experience. Arguing that co-creation and co-destruction may sometimes be separated by small nuances, Part V incorporates customer perceptions of service experiences by adopting a customer perspective.