Personal statement
I joined the Department of Marketing as a lecturer in October 2017. My research interests are focused on services marketing (service failure and recovery and service termination) and also the impact of new technologies such as Blockchain on customer loyalty and well-being. My research has been published in Journal of Service Research, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Service Theory & Practice and has also been presented at international marketing and service conferences. I am on the Editorial Board (and Associate Editor for Marketing) in the Iranian Journal of Management Studies and also review articles for service and marketing journals such as Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Theory & Practice, and Journal of Product & Brand Management. I teach Services Marketing and Consumers & Markets at the Undergraduate level and Consumer Behaviour, International Services Marketing, and International Marketing Research at the Postgraduate level.
Prior to joining Strathclyde Business School, I was a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh Business School and my research focused on unilateral termination of customer relationships. I have also worked for a number of years in the Financial Services, Non-profit, and Tourism sectors in different countries across Asia and Europe prior to pursuing a career in Academia.
Teaching
I teach classes on services marketing and marketing research at the undergraduate level. I also have experience in teaching CRM, consumer behaviour, and research methods at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Research interests
My research interests relate to services marketing and CRM. My primary focus is on service failure and recovery, service termination, customer satisfaction, loyalty and complaint behaviour in banking, airline and hotel industries.
I am also interested in transformative service research (particularly psychological and financial well-being) and also the impact of technology in services marketing. Particularly, I am keen to supervise PhD students on the following topics:
The impact of Fintech in consumer financial well-being
The impact of cryptocurrencies on service recovery and financial well-being
The role of gamification in customer engagement and service recovery.
Professional activities
- 12th AMA SERVSIG conference
- Organiser
- 2/6/2022
- Service provision in a fast changing global world
- Speaker
- 28/5/2021
- Seminar on Experimental Research
- Speaker
- 17/3/2021
- External PhD Supervisor
- Examiner
- 26/1/2021
- PhD Viva - Archareeporn Thanvarachorn (Internal Examiner)
- Examiner
- 22/10/2020
- International Journal of Hospitality Management (Journal)
- Peer reviewer
- 19/10/2020
More professional activities
Projects
- An Empirical Examination of the Effectiveness of Gamification in a Service Recovery Context
- Nazifi, Amin (Principal Investigator) Wilson, Alan (Co-investigator)
- When customers experience a service failure (e.g. an overcooked meal or a flight delay), they try to seek redress. Organisations may use different service recovery tools such as monetary or psychological compensation (Roschk & Gelbrich, 2014) to address customers’ complaints. Prior research shows that such measures can improve customers’ fairness perception and satisfaction (Tax, Brown, & Chandrashekaran, 1998), and also reduce customers’ anger and negative word of mouth behaviours (Gelbrich, 2010).
A large body of research on service failure and recovery has often focused on the effectiveness of conventional tools such as compensation. But despite recent technological advancements, the service recovery literature has still not looked beyond traditional recovery tools. Gamification has gained increased popularity in the marketing domain over the past few years (Larivière et al., 2017). Specifically, Van Vaerenbergh, Varga, De Keyser, and Orsingher (2018) call for research on the role of gamification in service recovery. Accordingly, the aim of this research is to examine the effects of gamification as an alternative recovery tool. Further, this research will shed light on the mechanism that explains customers’ reactions to a gamified service recovery and will also explore different boundary conditions. The research ultimately offers insights to managers on how to deal with service failures more efficiently by capitalising on modern technologies to deliver a gamified recovery.
- 10-Jan-2020 - 04-Jan-2022
- The Impact of Mobile Payment on Tourists' Behavioural Intentions
- Murdy, Samantha (Principal Investigator) Nazifi, Amin (Principal Investigator) Ding, Yang (Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019 - 01-Jan-2022
- Emerging Technologies in Service Research
- Nazifi, Amin (Academic) Murdy, Samantha (Academic) Marder, Ben (Academic) Gäthke, Jana (Academic) Shabani, Bardia (Academic)
- The Blockchain technology has been one of the most transformative technologies in our lives from improving efficiency in doing simple financial transactions (offering faster and less costly ways through cryptocurrencies) and how individuals and organisations invest. But, the use of Blockchain for decentralized data management has shown huge potential for applications beyond financial services (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016). That is why several companies, including IBM and Microsoft have started developing blockchain-based technology that can be adopted by industry partners.
Accordingly, the first stream of research will focus on the role of blockchain on consumer wellbeing. Healthcare is one of the sectors that has received major attention in recent years. According to Global Market Insights, Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Market is expected to cross $1.6 billion by 2025. Interoperability in healthcare has traditionally been focused around data exchange between business entities (e.g. different hospital systems). But, there has been a recent push towards patient-driven interoperability, in which health data exchange is patient-mediated and patient-driven (Gordon and Catalini, 2018). However, there has been limited research on the opportunities and challenges of adopting Blockchain in healthcare from a services marketing perspective, and particularly, how this may affect consumer well-being.
The second stream of research will focus on the role of blockchain in the field of service recovery. There is little doubt about the potential for cryptocurrency to revolutionize payment. Specifically, cryptocurrencies have found their way as an alternative form of payment in retail and hospitality sectors (e.g. there are various companies accepting Bitcoin as payment for airline ticket, booking hotels and holidays, or even buying food), yet there is a lack of research on its effectiveness as an innovative service recovery strategy. Hence, this research will provide the first examination of crypto-compensation (i.e. compensation 2.0), to shed initial light on whether firms should offer crypto-compensation instead of traditional vouchers or cash) to increase customer satisfaction and repurchase intention and also reduce their negative word of mouth intentions.
- 01-Jan-2019
- Investigating the Role of Proactivity in Managing Service Failures
- Nazifi, Amin (Academic) Gelbrich, Katja (Academic) Grégoire, Yany (Academic) El-Manstrly, Dahlia (Academic) Wirtz, Jochen (Academic) Koch, Sebastian (Academic) Raki, Amir (Academic) Nayer, Daud (Academic) Alexander, Matthew (Academic) Seyfi, Siamak (Academic)
- Prior research on service failure and recovery predominantly focus on reactive strategies to reduce customers’ negative reactions (e.g. offering compensation, apology or an explanation why the failure has occurred) and there is a lack of research on more proactive strategies in dealing with service failures. In broad terms, proactivity is defined as anticipating and preventing problems before they materialize (Bateman and Crant 1999). In a service failure context, proactivity is defined as firms anticipating potential service failures and acting prior to customer reactions to control or minimize the impact of these failures. Combining the concept of proactivity with service recovery and the transformative service research framework, the research aims to examine its effects on firms (e.g. profitability, employee attrition, and negative word of mouth) as well as on customers (e.g. customer satisfaction and well-being).
- 01-Jan-2017 - 01-Jan-2022
- Examining Customers' Reactions to Intentional Failures
- Nazifi, Amin (Academic) El-Manstrly, Dahlia (Academic) Gelbrich, Katja (Academic) Roschk, Holger (Academic) Marder, Ben (Academic) Tregear, Angela (Academic) Auxtova, Kristina (Academic) Ordenes, Francisco Villarroel (Academic)
- Intentional failures, which refer to purposeful transgressions by the organization or its employees against customers, has received little scholarly attention. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are regular instances of failures to which consumers may ascribe some intentionality. For example, airlines, hotels, and restaurants overbook and overcharge their customers, and banks unilaterally close customers’ accounts. Besides transgression on the firm level, individual employees may also account for such failure instances due to revenge in response to customer misbehaviour (Harris and Ogbonna 2002). Prior research from the psychology literature shows that people are sensitive to an intentional harm, inflating its perceived magnitude (Ames & Fiske, 2013).
Yet, despite its marketplace relevance and theoretical importance, research on intentional failures remains largely unexplored in the service context. Against this background, this project aims to provide a better understanding of intentional failures and how intentionality translates into negative customer responses. Accordingly, the project is divided into two main streams: In the first stream, the research focuses on customers’ reactions to intentional failures such as firm-initiated service termination. In the second stream, the research focuses on the construct of intentionality to provide a better understanding of customers’ evaluation of attribution dimensions following service failures and also to capture the true effect of intentionality through examining how intentional compared to unintentional failures affect customers’ attitudinal, emotional, and behavioural reactions. Further, the project aims to provide more nuanced insights into intentional failures by exploring boundary conditions under which intentional failures are less (or more) harmful.
- 01-Jan-2013
More projects