Projects

The Chair of Marketing & Service Management continues the project started in Bielefeld:
In the joint project InChangE, the Universities of Münster and Bielefeld are researching causes, mechanisms and effects of individualization in changing environments in an interdisciplinary discourse of humanities, natural and social sciences. The disciplines represented in InChangE are biology, philosophy, sociology, economics, psychology, geoinformatics, psychiatry and health sciences. InChangE is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the period from November 2021 to October 2024.
Funding stream:
Ministry of Culture and Science (MKW) of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia - "Profiling 2020 NRW" program.
Spokesperson:

• Prof. Dr. Barbara Caspers
• Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gadau

Participants:

• 16 professors of Bielefeld University from the fields of biology, health sciences, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology
• 8 professors of the University of Münster from the fields of biology, geoinformatics, medicine, philosophy, psychiatry

Further information:
Project website (https://www.uni-muenster.de/JICE/projekte/inchange.html)
Joint Institute for Individualization in a Changing Environment, Münster (https://www.uni-muenster.de/JICE/)

(funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); reference no: BI 1763/1-1; Funding: 2014-2020)
Service failures are unavoidable, especially due to the heterogeneity of services and the customer's involvement in service creation. In order to correct errors and restore the customer's satisfaction, companies initiate a so-called service recovery, which besides customer satisfaction, also influences the customer's loyalty and repurchase intention. To achieve such positive evaluations on the customer side, it is important for service providers to know those factors that strengthen or weaken these customer evaluations. For example, the influence of perceived justice and emotion has been studied several times, whereas the importance of customer involvement in the form of co-production has been largely ignored in this context. This research gap is surprising, as customers are required to provide information or take on tasks in most service recovery processes, and thus co-produce the process. It is reasonable to assume that the extent of this co-production has an impact on post-recovery evaluations. Therefore, the proposed project investigates the impact of co-production in recovery on customer post-recovery evaluations (including satisfaction; recommendation, compensation expectation). In doing so, it considers situations in which service recovery is initiated by the customer (i.e., reactive) as well as situations in which it is initiated by the organization (i.e., proactive). In addition, the project identifies personal and situation-specific moderators of the underlying context. To this end, the project includes both qualitative and quantitative empirical studies.
For more information on the project findings, click here.
Recent publications from the project:

• Hogreve, J.; Bilstein, N.; Hoerner, L. (2019). Service Recovery on Stage: Effects of Social Media Recovery on Virtually Present Others, Journal of Service Research, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 421-439.
• Bilstein, N. (2018). The Moderating Effect of Customers? Willingness to Participate in Service Recovery and Its Impacting Factors - An Empirical Analysis. Journal of Service Management Research, 2(3), pp. 17-29.
• Hogreve, J., Bilstein, N. and Mandl, L. (2017). Unveiling the Recovery Time Zone of Tolerance: When Time Matters
  in Service Recovery. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(6), pp. 866-883.
  
• Bilstein, N., Matta, S. M. and Hogreve, J. (2016). Thank You for Your Helping Hand! Ways to Avoid Negative Consequences of Customer Participation in Recovery of Technology Product Failure, in: Special Session on? It's
  All Around You: The Pervasive Effects of Technology on Consumers' Lives?. NA? Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 44, eds. Page Moreau and Stefano Puntoni, Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research, pp. 65-69.