Fostering collaborative research for customer experience – Connecting academic and practitioner worlds

This editorial calls for greater use of academic-practitioner workshops to co-create value for academics, practitioners and wider network actors through promotion of research relevance and sharing of problems, ideas and data. It describes how one such workshop, the 2nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop focusing on the design and decision making for customer experience (CE), co-hosted in Manchester on 18th and 19th of June 2018 by Alliance Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester and Loughborough University’s Centre for Service Management (CSM), was delivered. The key processes for success and issues to consider for future such events are discussed. The workshop resulted in 8 papers (six theoretical and two empirical). This Special Issue advances current understanding of CE through the research considering the role of technology (AI and big data) in CE research, atypical CE (vulnerability, deviance behaviours and service failure and recovery) and focusing on important organizational and B2B issues (business model innovation, and CE Management (CEM) in business markets).