Beyond the Embodied Digital Service Encounter: The Co-Creation of a Web Service Recovery

When a digital service encounter develops differently than anticipated, the client becomes a user. This transformation reveals the ambiguous nature of digital service encounter being neither well-functioning tools, nor having the same sensitivity to and tolerance for service failures as in human service encounters. Through the case-study of a service failure and subsequent co-creation of the service recovery, this chapter introduces and unfolds the concept of 'cognitively dominated service encounters'. This category is suggested to supplement and criticise Paul Dourish's (2001) concept of Embodied Interaction. With a micro analysis of the interaction in this service journey, we identify the need for a category of knowledge intensive service encounters that acknowledge both the complexity of the service provided, but also the constraints and possibilities in the digital design material.