This is an essential resource for managers and scholars interested in services marketing. It covers the topic comprehensively and in novel ways. All the luminaries in the field are represented. Buy this book and you will be up to date on the field.' - Valarie Zeithaml, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, USThe Handbook of Service Marketing Research brings together an all-star team of leading researchers in service marketing to explore many of the hottest topics in service marketing today. Cutting-edge topics include: customer relationships and loyalty, customer-centered metrics, managing customer contacts, product and pricing, digital service marketing, rethinking the marketing function, and service for society. This book, which includes authors from both academia and industry, will provide academics with an invaluable current view of the field and practitioners with a window into the latest academic thinking. With chapters from internationally renowned contributors, this comprehensive yet concise Handbook will appeal to service marketing academics, researchers and service practitioners. Contributors: M. Archpru Akaka, L. Aksoy, L. Anderson, T.W. Andreassen, S.F.M. Beckers, M.J. Bitner, R.N. Bolton, A. Buoye, J.W. Choi, R.M. Christopher, T.S. Chung, T.S. Dagger, P.S. Danaher, A. De Keyser, C. Dev, B. Edvardsson, S. Fay, R.P. Fisk, C. Frennea, A. Gustafsson, M.-H. Huang, C. Ishida, P.K. Kannan, T.L. Keiningham, P. Kristensson, V. Kumar, S.K. Kwan, T. van Laer, B. Lariviere, R.F. Lusch, D. Mathras, H. Melton, V. Mittal, R.L. Oliver, A.L. Ostrom, P. Patterson, W. Reinartz, H. Risselada, R.T. Rust, K. de Ruyter, C. Schulze, S.M. Shugan, B. Skiera, J. Spohrer, S. Streukens, S.A. Taylor, B. Tronvoll, W. Ulaga, N. Umashankar, S.L. Vargo, P.C. Verhoef, H.S. Wang, M. Wedel, R.A. Westbrook, L. Williams, L. Witell, J. Xie, T. Yu

In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base.

The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity.

In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

The advent of the era of "e-Service," the provision of services over electronic networks like the internet, is one of the dominant business themes of the new millennium. It reflects the fundamental shift in the economy from goods to services and the explosive expansion of information technology. This book provides a collection of different perspectives on e-Service and a unified framework to understand it, even as the business community grapples with the concept. It features contributions from key researchers and practitioners from both the private and public sectors, as well leading scholars from the fields of marketing, information systems, and computer science. They focus on three key areas: the customer-technology interface; e-Service business opportunities and strategies; and public sector e-Service opportunities. The insights they offer will be equally useful to students, scholars, and practitioners.

The advent of the era of "e-Service," the provision of services over electronic networks like the internet, is one of the dominant business themes of the new millennium. It reflects the fundamental shift in the economy from goods to services and the explosive expansion of information technology. This book provides a collection of different perspectives on e-Service and a unified framework to understand it, even as the business community grapples with the concept. It features contributions from key researchers and practitioners from both the private and public sectors, as well leading scholars from the fields of marketing, information systems, and computer science. They focus on three key areas: the customer-technology interface; e-Service business opportunities and strategies; and public sector e-Service opportunities. The insights they offer will be equally useful to students, scholars, and practitioners.

As machines are trained to "think," many tasks that previously required human intelligence are becoming automated through artificial intelligence. However, it is more difficult to automate emotional intelligence, and this is where the human worker's competitive advantage over machines currently lies. This book explores the impact of AI on everyday life, looking into workers' adaptation to these changes, the ways in which managers can change the nature of jobs in light of AI developments, and the potential for humans and AI to continue working together. The book argues that AI is rapidly assuming a larger share of thinking tasks, leaving human intelligence to focus on feeling. The result is the "Feeling Economy," in which both employees and consumers emphasize feeling to an unprecedented extent, with thinking tasks largely delegated to AI. The book shows both theoretical and empirical evidence that this shift is well underway. Further, it explores the effect of the Feeling Economy on our everyday lives in the areas such as shopping, politics, and education. Specifically, it argues that in this new economy, through empathy and people skills, women may gain an unprecedented degree of power and influence. This book will appeal to readers across disciplines interested in understanding the impact of AI on business and our daily lives. It represents a bold, potentially controversial attempt to gauge the direction in which society is heading.