Designing and delivering services with stories: how service stories and consumer transportability affect the customer experience and outcomes

Service design scholars and service providers have long explored the application of stories in the design of experiential services to enhance the customer experience. Our understanding, however, of how stories influence the customer experience and customer intentions during the actual delivery of services remains limited. To advance knowledge in this area, we conducted two experiments in which services were designed and delivered with and without stories. The data were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Our findings indicate that incorporating a story does enhance the customer experience, but this effect is fully mediated by customer-perceived narrative structure. We also proposed that customer transportability, an individual-level trait, plays a key role in influencing customer-perceived narrative structure, though the evidence supporting this effect was mixed. Overall, our study provides useful insights for scholars and managers on how to more effectively leverage the power of stories to enhance the customer experience.