Comprehending, Evaluating, and Recovering the Value of Service Experiences

The preamble and the three studies of the dissertation are designed to answer two research questions. First, "What is the anatomy of service experience value from customer and provider perspectives?, followed by "How do contextual factors influence the service providers' capacity to recover value when services fail?" The preamble introduces the concept of value, outlining its evolution, emphasizing the critical disparities among the dominant research perspectives, and justifying the urgency of the present research. The dissertation adopts the Grönroos-Voima value model to tap into value co-creation processes across three spheres: customers, service providers, and joint sphere. This is done by uncovering the structure of the customer value-in-use perceptions (Study 1), evaluating service providers' value proposition against those perceptions (Study 2), and assessing the impact of service recovery actions on customers forgiveness and service expectations in the context of varying prior service experiences and harm direction (Study 3). The dissertation identified the fifteen key attributes describing the value of the hotel experiences and uncovered the critical discrepancies between the value perceptions and value proposition narratives. It also determined the varying effect of prior service recovery experience and service recovery actions on forgiveness on victims and observers of service transgressions. Each study outlined the limitations of the empirical research along with the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.