Buy-Online-Pick-up-in-Store (BOPS), also known as “click-and-collect” service, allows customers to order and purchase items online and pick them up at an offline store (Kim et al., 2017), without direct assistance from an employee or a courier (Chen et al., 2018), BOPS as evolved into a popular omnichannel strategy of retailers for its ability to attract online consumers to brick-and-mortar stores, leading to several competitive advantages over purely online service (Lee & Choi, 2020). As the integration between online and offline channels increases (Duarte et al, 2018), there has been a growing uptake of this service, which has ultimately been accelerated in the last couple of years by the pandemic (Statista, 2020a).

Successfully managing BOPS service quality is important for several reasons. First, omnichannel shoppers are considered more valuable than single-channel shoppers for their higher loyalty and spending (Shi et al., 2020). Second, BOPS perceived quality is likely to generate a spillover effect from the service itself to the provider, impacting not only customers’ adoption but also overall satisfaction and loyalty (Rosenmayer et al., 2018). However, customers still suffer from several service quality issues while picking up items in the store. Hence, measuring the service quality of BOPS, considering the distinctive needs and wants of omnichannel customers, as well as understanding its impacts on customer attitudes and behaviors towards the service itself and the provider is of relevance. Yet, the topic remains virtually unexplored in the literature to date, particularly regarding the customer perspective (Cai & Lo, 2020).

Hence, to bridge this literature gap, this study aims to answer the following research questions (RQ): RQ1: what dimensions determine customers’ evaluation of BOPS perceived quality? RQ2: how does customers’ satisfaction with BOPS impact their loyalty towards the service and the provider – i.e., is there a spillover effect? A unique research model was built based on existing studies on self-service technologies and on the scarce omnichannel research. A sample of 614 BOPS users was asked to evaluate the service according to their own experience. Findings show that perceived enjoyment was the most important driver of BOPS service quality, followed by perceived reliability and control. On the other hand, speed of service delivery, ease-of-use and cost savings only proved to have an indirect effect on service quality. The impact of BOPS perceived quality on attitudes and behaviors towards the service itself and the provider was also validated. Lastly, the moderating role of situational factors (e.g., product type, location) is also examined.

Academically, this research addresses the topic “technology and the customer experience”, recently elected as a service research priority (Ostrom et al., 2021). Moreover, while shedding some light on the BOPS phenomenon from the customers’ perspective, this study aims to contribute to omnichannel management research, which is still in its infancy. Managerially, study findings can help practitioners realize the importance of managing BOPS service quality, gain insights on what consumers really value in this service and better determine management priorities among critical BOPS service quality dimensions.

In the recent decade, social media has flooded people’s life, even inside the workplace. Given the popularity of social media among customers, service employees adopt this social platform to connect and communicate with customers and colleagues, and around half of their working hours are spent on the online interactions. Frontline employees (FLEs) are investing large amounts of time to social media, but firms may not see the benefits of this investment. Some service organisations see employees’ social media use as deviant behaviours and ban the usage in the workplace.
This paper is against the restriction strategy by exploring the mechanism by which the social ties of social media are transformed into benefits to the firms through the theoretical lens of social capital. Additionally, for service employees, how various types of social capital drive their actions and customer service performance are examined within financial service firms.
Building social network ties externally with customers on social media (i.e., structural capital), FLEs are hypothesised to acquire cognitive capital (i.e., knowledge about customers) and relational capital (i.e., closeness and identification with customers). Building social network ties internally with colleagues, it is hypothesised to enable the sharing of customer knowledge amongst FLEs but leads to identification with their organisation. It is predicted via the internal and external social capital that social media drives customer-oriented constructive deviance and customer service performance.
A survey-based approach was designed to test the conceptual framework. Empirical evidence is collected from 388 paired responses (i.e., employee self-reported and supervisor-rated surveys) within Chinese financial service corporates. Based on the results, externally, social media customer ties increase both customer knowledge assimilation and FLE customer identification. The customer knowledge assimilation partially mediates the relationship between social media customer ties and FLE customer identification. Internally, social media co-worker ties only increase co-worker knowledge assimilation about customer, which fully mediates the relationship between social media co-worker ties and FLE organisational identification.
In terms of the outcomes of social capital, both internal and external cognitive social capital positively influence employee customer service performance. Meanwhile, both organisational identification and customer identification are proven to enhance employee customer service performance. For employees’ customer-oriented constructive deviance, both internal and external cognitive social capitals are confirmed to enhance this action, and external one has stronger impacts than the internal one. Only customer identification drives employees to take customer-oriented constructive deviance. A non-significant relationship is found between organisational identification and employee customer-oriented constructive deviance.
This paper makes three theoretical contributions. First, it provides empirical evidence by exploring the way FLEs use social media to connect with their co-workers and customers in an insurance service setting. Second, it extends insights on service frontline behaviours by investigating how social media use shape employees’ extra-role behaviours when they interact with customers. Third, this study extends insights in social capital literature by examining the relative importance of internal and external social capitals in driving employees’ extra-role customer service actions and customer service performance.

Extent research highlights the potentials that the introduction of new technologies and digitization of the work environment implies. Salespeople and frontline employees are enabled to work more efficiently and better focus on core activities if they use the capabilities of the digital work infrastructure (Larivière et al. 2017). However, recent research focused on the potential negative effects of increased interactions with digital technologies in the workplace for the employee (Tarafdar et al. 2014). Given these rather contradictory potentials evoked by the digitized work environment, it remains unclear when and how technology is a means to empower and when it endangers the employee. We argue that understanding the concept of employee vulnerability experience, as well as its antecedents and consequences for well-being, is crucial to address this gap. In reference to the concept of consumer vulnerability (Baker et al. 2005) we aim at an nuanced description of the aspects that define employee vulnerability in a digitized work environment. Thus, our study explores what defines employee vulnerability in a digitized work environment.
To approach this question we conducted 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews with sales and frontline employees. The ongoing data analysis reveals first insights from the qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2009). Despite, the digital work environment is critical to individual job performance, it bears perceptions of risk. Thus, risk narratives of being overwhelmed and of insecurity in the digital work environment are manifestations that we found to be critical to the experience of employee vulnerability.
First, interviewees reveal that the risk of a technology being useless, not sufficiently accessible, or not well fitted to the employee’s tasks, brings along a generalized skepticism about the transformation. A lacking fit of the technology thus makes employees more reluctant to keep up with innovations. They tend to become indifferent towards the capabilities that new technologies offer and feel “left behind” by the high velocity of technological advancement. Second, a lack of a coherent corporate digital strategy, data policy, and security about customer data collection and storage leave the individual employee in a state of uncertainty about the legitimacy of their behaviors with customer and project data. But also the sharing of knowledge and exclusive information in digital applications to enable customer analytics, is regarded as critical creating a feeling of “being left alone”.
Our study contributes an understanding of the risks that the transformation into digitized work environments bears for the employee’s experience of vulnerability. It thereby extends the concept of vulnerability from marketplace interactions among consumers, into the work environment where employee vulnerability is triggered by the demands of technological advancements. With our research we wish to enlighten when technology is a means to empower the employee and when it endangers health. With this understanding organizations can learn how the configurations of the digital work environment should be arranged to mitigate employee vulnerability, maintain their health, and ultimately secure service quality. Practitioners can gain insights in what it takes to formulate corporate digitization strategies that avoid the emergence of employee vulnerability.

Digitalization is one of the most dramatic changes for society and organizations in recent years (Huang & Rust, 2018). It has not only been a way to streamline internal operations (digitization) but also a way to enhance customer-facing activities (digitalization) (Sklyar et al., 2019). One area where digitalization has been quite pervasive is within so-called cultural service organizations such as museums, theatres, and operas (Sagiv and Yeheskel, 2020). One can for instance visit the Louvre with all their rooms online (Evrard and Krebs, 2018). Similar to other types of events (concerts, conferences, etc.) the service of these organizations is often considered more than a specific performance or exhibition. Their physical presence (buildings, audience, etc.) is more than a utilitarian function (Hirsch, 2000). Instead, these services contain value-in-context (Edvardsson et al., 2011) that enhances the service for consumers, before, during, and after the performance takes place. Digitalization may dilute many of these contextual service aspects, still many cultural services are currently digitally transforming.

Knowledge of how digitalization of cultural services takes place is limited to overall descriptions of how the core of the offering has been digitalized and how visitors experience these offerings (De Bernardi, et al., 2019). Less is known of the interplay between digital and "physical" service offerings. That is, being a service provider to both a digital and to a live audience, simultaneously or in parallel. Hence, the overarching aim of this study is to explain how digitalization of different processes can be utilized by cultural service organizations to balance the efficiency and artistic values of all performances without losing their overarching service offerings' potential value-in-context.

To achieve more fine-grained knowledge of the impact of digitalization on cultural services we have drawn on a wide range of literature in the fields of service research and digitalization, as well as conducted an in-depth study with 26 interviews of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, which is a cultural service forerunner for digital service offerings. Interviews include a wide array of employees around the opera, ranging from the artistic directors and producers to legal, sales, human resources, and technical department.

We have found that their digital transformation processes include a wide range of sub-processes, from back-end processes such as planning and ticketing to the actual opera performance and the more general customer interactions. By describing and analyzing how and why Opera worked with the digitization of these processes, and how these processes influence value creation in both the physical and digital context, we contribute with a detailed knowledge of the practice of digitization, as well as its opportunities in cultural service organizations. We further contribute with a number of challenges that need to be overcome for the process to continue, including copyright issues, employee resistance, lack of training, and technical and market resources.