Given the growth of the service sector, and advances in information technology and communications that facilitate the management of relationships with customers, models of service and relationships are a fast-growing area of marketing science. This article summarizes existing work in this area...

Service encounters are the focal point of a customer’s perception of a service in terms of its quality, value and customer satisfaction. The paper researches the influence of the components of a service encounter on customer satisfaction. Among several factors that determine customer...

This article demonstrates that socially anxious consumers avoid close relationships with merchants. An experimental approach (n=102) shows that socially anxious consumers prefer small talk with merchants rather than intimate conversations, whereas non-socially anxious consumers prefer intimate...

Extant service recovery research treats apology as a dichotomy, in that it is either present or absent, but how it is conveyed is neglected. Based upon social psychological research, this study argues that an apology comprises three different components: empathy, intensity, and timing, which...