Customer engagement with a service offering: a framework for complex services

Customer engagement (CE) represents a topic of rapidly increasing interest to academics and practitioners, largely due to its focus on the interactions between the consumer and the brand, which in the context of services represents a key ‘building block’ of service delivery. Indeed, the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), which develops research priorities to refl ect the most pressing needs and interests of marketers in business, identifi es the conceptualisation, defi nition and measurement of engagement as a Tier 1 priority (2014-2016). To date, CE research has centred on customer interactions with brands and organisations (Brodie, Hollebeek, Juric and Ilic, 2011), with other literature streams focusing more specifi cally on employee engagement (e.g. Kahn, 1990, 1992; Salanova, Agut and Peiro, 2005) and school engagement (e.g. Fredricks, Blumenfeld and Paris, 2004; Li and Lerner, 2013). However, while CE is often contextual and unique to an individual, existing literature rarely sheds light on actor engagement (Chandler and Lush, 2015) or, more specifi cally, the engagement with a complex service offering, which is likely to comprise engagement with the service provider, their advice and the service process.Sylvia Ng, Carolin Plewa and Jillian C. Sweene