Purpose Smart technologies and connected objects are rapidly changing the organizational frontline. Yet, our understanding of how these technologies infuse service encounters remains limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to update existing classifications of Frontline Service Technology (FST) infusion. Moreover, the authors discuss three promising smart and connected technologies – conversational agents, extended reality (XR) and blockchain technology – and their respective implications for customers, frontline employees and service organizations. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a conceptual approach integrating existing work on FST infusion with artificial intelligence, robotics, XR and blockchain literature, while also building on insights gathered through expert interviews and focus group conversations with members of two service research centers. Findings The authors define FST and propose a set of FST infusion archetypes at the organizational frontline. Additionally, the authors develop future research directions focused on understanding how conversational agents, XR and blockchain technology will impact service. Originality/value This paper updates and extends existing classifications of FST, while paving the road for further work on FST infusion.

Gamification has attracted considerable practitioner attention and has become a viable tactic for influencing behavior, boosting innovation, and improving marketing outcomes across industries. Simultaneously, studies on the use of gamification techniques have emerged in diverse fields, including computer science, education, and healthcare. Despite the broad popularity of gamification in other fields, it has received only limited attention in the service literature. Moreover, the findings of extant studies on gamification in the service field are inconclusive and suggest an incomplete understanding of the employment of gamification in service contexts. Thus, this study aims to integrate the growing but scattered cross-disciplinary literature on gamification and to emphasize its relevance to service research. Specifically, we first conceptualize gamification for service and differentiate it from related concepts. Then, using a systematic literature review, we identify 34 empirical articles that reflect this gamification conceptualization and can be connected to relevant service research themes (e.g., customer participation, experience, and loyalty). Employing activity theory, we derive four higher-order functions of gamification: production, consumption, exchange, and distribution. Finally, we develop a research agenda to generate a better understanding of the central aspects within each of the identified gamification functions and stimulate future academic efforts on gamification in services.

In this article, the authors demonstrate a tendency among consumers to use the arithmetic mode as a heuristic basis when drawing inferences from graphical displays of online rating distributions in such a way that service evaluations inferred from rating distributions systematically vary by the location of the mode. The rationale underlying this phenomenon is that the mode (i.e., the most frequent rating which is represented by the tallest bar in a graphical display) attracts consumers’ attention because of its visual salience and is thus disproportionately weighted when they draw conclusions. Across a series of eight studies, the authors provide strong empirical evidence for the existence of the mode heuristic, shed light on this phenomenon at the process level, and demonstrate how consumers’ inferences based on the mode heuristic depend on the visual salience of the mode. Together, the findings of these studies contribute to a better understanding of how service customers process and interpret graphical illustrations of online rating distributions and provide companies with a new key figure that—aside from rating volume, average ratings, and rating dispersion—should be incorporated in the monitoring, analyzing, and evaluating of review data.

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