Samiha Mjahed Hammami

Purpose: In artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated contexts, interactions are carried out by non-human entities that assume roles traditionally performed by human employees raising questions about their effectiveness in emotionally charged contexts such as service recovery, particularly in high-touch industries like hospitality and tourism. This study investigates the differential effectiveness of economic vs symbolic recovery strategies enacted by AI chatbots in shaping customer recovery satisfaction, forgiveness and revisit intention. Design/methodology/approach: Three experimental studies were conducted in the airlines and hotels settings, recruiting participants from an online panel who interacted with a real chatbot in a simulated service failure recovery scenario. Findings: Study 1 reveals that while chatbot economic and symbolic recovery strategies are equally successful in fostering customer forgiveness, economic recovery stands out for its stronger impact on recovery satisfaction. Study 2 uncovers the mechanism linking AI-chatbot recovery strategies to customer recovery outcomes, revealing that only symbolic recovery enhances perceived experience and reduces psychological distance, whereas economic recovery and perceived agency show no such effect. Study 3 identifies a boundary condition: economic recovery outperforms symbolic recovery under high failure severity, but both are equally effective under low severity. Originality/value: Our study offers novel insights into the effectiveness of AI-driven recovery by demonstrating that the most successful chatbot is not the one that fully mimics human employees, but the one that leverages its distinctive capabilities-flawless execution of compensation and well-designed empathy. By prioritizing care, competence and customer emotional well-being over artificial independence, firms can maximize recovery satisfaction and reinforce customer relationships.

Facing growing sustainability challenges and the critical priority of digital transformation, this study explores, through the lens of the dynamic capability view, the links between big data, sustainable performance, and green supply chain in a circular economy logic, filling a notable gap in emerging markets, particularly the pharmaceutical sector. Our study proposes an original conceptual model linking big data analytics to the circular economy, tested with 275 employees from the Saudi pharmaceutical sector. The results, obtained through state-of-the-art PLS-SEM modeling, indicate a significant positive impact of big data analytics on sustainable performance and green supply chain management within the circular economy framework. The study also reveals the crucial mediating role of sustainable performance and green supply chain management in the relationship between big data analytics and the circular economy. Our study proposes an integrated framework for understanding how digital technologies support the circular economy in emerging markets, with practical implications for pharmaceutical sector actors and policymakers, in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.

Purpose: So far, whether customers' involvement strengthens or weakens the process of service recovery has remained unclear. Filling this gap, this study aims to investigate the effect of customers' participation on customers' post-recovery outcomes in the context of the banking industry. More specifically, this study delineates how and when customer participation (CP) proves effective in creating and enhancing favourable post-recovery outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: With the help of an online survey, this study collects responses from 314 bank customers and analyses them using SmartPLS. Findings: The results show that customers' participation in service recovery positively affects customers' perceived utilitarian and hedonic values. Customers' perceived utilitarian and hedonic values positively influence customers' recovery satisfaction which, in turn, positively relates to their continuance intention and positive word-of-mouth (PWOM). Furthermore, customers' positive psychological capital (CPPC) positively moderates the relationship of CP in service recovery with perceived utilitarian value and hedonic value. Originality/value: This study unveils the negative facet of co-created service recovery, which has rarely been addressed in the service recovery literature, especially in the context of the banking industry. This study demonstrates that the effectiveness of customers' participation in creating favourable post-recovery outcomes is contingent on CPPC. Moreover, this study confirms that not all customers may value customers' participation in the service recovery process.

Purpose: The research aims to addresses the limitations of previous literature regarding choosing the appropriate conceptualization of trust (i.e. interpersonal trust or system trust) and the role of design aesthetics in generating system trust and intention to adopt mobile banking.Design/methodology/approach: The research conducts two studies. Study 1 determines the degree of humanness in a mobile banking application. Study 2 tests the research model. A total of 261 respondents participate in Study 1 and 491 in Study 2. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) (study 1) and SmartPLS (PLS software) (study 2) are used to test the hypotheses.Findings: Study 1 establishes that the mobile banking application is perceived to have low humanness. Thus, it is expected that system trust is more appropriate to use than interpersonal trust. Study 2 demonstrates that (i) system trust is more useful than interpersonal trust in the mobile banking context and (ii) design aesthetics positively influences consumer system trust and intention to adopt.Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, the current research is the first to distinguish empirically between system trust and interpersonal trust and identify the best choice of mobile banking trust type. Specifically, the study determined the choice of system trust for mobile banking through a priori humanness measures and validated this choice by measuring both system trust and interpersonal trust, which has not been done before. In addition, retail banking should consider the influence of design aesthetics on consumer trust and incorporate elements that enhance consumers' opinions about the mobile banking application's functionality, reliability and helpfulness.

Despite growing interest in issues of place attachment and land use changes, scholars of renewable energy have tended to overlook the ways that people–place relations affect local acceptance/opposition of renewable energy projects. We address this gap drawing on the concept of customer experience to capture the meaning of place attachment in a specific context of climate change adaptation (e.g., proposals to site large-scale low-carbon energy technologies such as wind farms) and deepening understanding of the role of place attachment in shaping community responses to the local siting of renewable energy technologies. This research adopts a phenomenological approach that focuses on exploring the residents’ experiences with the local place where they live (a village in Northeast Tunisia) as well as the meanings they attribute to the project. Results show that according to the evaluation of change, whether the renewable energy project enhances or disrupts the different aspects of place experience, residents will exhibit respectively either positive or negative emotions and attitudes and will take action accordingly either by supporting or protesting the project.

This paper investigates the role of customer orientation (CO), technology orientation (TO), and internal orientation (IO) in explaining firms’ service recovery performances. Multilevel analysis is used for data collected from 500 complaining customers nested in 100 firms to test the study’s hypotheses. Findings show that while the three knowledge-based resources (CO, IO, and TO) increase customers’ recovery satisfaction, only the human knowledge resources provide a buffer effect against the detrimental effects of service failures through the activation of their confirmatory biases. The result indicates the viability of TO as a recovery reactive resource rather than as a preventive resource.

While there is an increased need to streamline the deployment of sustainable energy projects and high public advocacy for their implementation, projects of this type are often met with public opposition once proposed in a local context. Even although several attempts have been advanced to explain this attitude‐behaviour dissension, these explanations remain partial in how they cover the local opposition issue. There is, in fact, a dearth of research investigating in an integrative way the underlying motivations and/or obstacles for local acceptance. Based on a case study of wind energy using triangulation among a variety of different sources of data from the stakeholders involved, this study aims to uncover how the acceptance of sustainable projects emerges in community contexts. Findings reveal the barriers and motivational factors behind the acceptance of sustainable projects that managers must integrate in their business strategies in the hope of successfully initiating and sustaining behaviour‐change programmes.