Marketing in general and services in particular have been blamed for damaging, disregarding, and maltreating consumer's well-being in a multitude of ways; either by having a patronizing style of service delivery, or by underserving groups in needs (Fisk, 2009) . As a result, the Transformative Service Research (TSR) movement began. Emerging at the intersection of transformative consumer research and service research (Anderson et al., 2013) , TSR is defined as "service research that centers on creating uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of individuals (consumers and employees), families, social networks, communities, cities, nations, collectives, and ecosystems" (Ostrom et al., 2010, p. 6). Due to the direct and dialogic interaction between the service company and the customer, this dynamic nature of services presents substantial transformative potential (Anderson et al., 2010) . Anderson et al. (2013) present a framework illustrating how interaction between service entities and consumer entities influences the wellbeing of both. Service entities include employees, processes, offerings, organizations, and service sectors, while consumer entities comprise individuals, collectives, and the ecosystem (Anderson et al., 2013) . Therefore, when any consumer entity interacts with any service entity, during a value-creation process, potential well-being outcomes are generated for both parties such as access, health, life satisfaction, harmony, power, respect, support, and happiness (Anderson et al., 2013) . In light of the above, we propose that customer feedback generated during a value creation process, can have potential well-being outcomes on service and consumer entities. According to Lusch and Vargo (2006) , "conversation and dialogue" (p. 413) is one of the four building blocks of a company's strategic marketing direction. Customer feedback, a particular type of "conversation and dialogue", allows companies to listen to customers to understand what it is that they value in the company (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) . Previous research has proposed various important outcomes of customer feedback management, such as: assistance in performance assessment, facilitation of organizational learning (Babbar and Koufteros, 2008) , improvement of overall service quality , better decision making (Bitner et al., 1994) and generation of competitive advantage (Lusch et al., 2007) . However, the impact of customer feedback on the service entities' well-being remains an overlooked area. Adopting a TSR approach, this study aims to address this gap by exploring the impact of customer feedback on the well-being of service entities. Moreover, inspired by the objectives of TSR to "create uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being" (Ostrom et al., 2010, p. 6), the importance of positive customer feedback is stressed. Positive customer feedback is a highly under-researched topic. Most previous research has approached customer feedback from a negative lens, focusing on the impact of 3 customer complaints, dysfunctional customer behavior and service recovery, on front-line employees and companies in general. Accordingly, this paper focuses on exploring the impact of positive customer feedback on the well-being of front-line employees and its outcome for companies, since front-line employees are the main recipients of customer feedback (Lovelock and Wirtz, 2010) . Moreover, working within the TSR framework, employees' and managers' perceptions about the impact of positive feedback on society are proposed. Finally, a comparison of employees' and managers' perceptions about positive feedback is presented. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: given the current lack of knowledge concerning positive customer feedback impact and associated well-being outcomes, an extensive multidisciplinary literature review was conducted, followed by two exploratory qualitative research studies with managers and front-line employees in service companies. This resulted in the development of the "Positive Feedback Model" (PFM) contributing to the growing TSR movement. Subsequently, a comparison of managerial and employee views around positive customer feedback is presented. The paper concludes with a summary of the main contributions and limitations of the study, and presents directions for future research. Literature review Customer feedback is defined as customer communication concerning a product or a service (Erickson and Eckrich, 2001) . Customer feedback can be either solicited or unsolicited (Berry and Parasuraman, 1997). Solicited feedback is encouraged by the company through the usage of tools such as surveys and focus groups that invite customers to give feedback (Sampson, 1996) . In contrast, unsolicited customer feedback relies on the customer's own desire and will to communicate his/her experiences (Sampson, 1996) . Taking this categorization a step forward, Day and Landon (1977) Computer-mediated communication led to the rise of the electronic word of mouth (eWOM) (Litvin et al., 2008) . Thus, social media presented a new channel of feedback, where once privately communicated feedback is now public. Finally, customer influence is no more restricted to verbal WOM communication, as a new conceptualization includes non-verbal communication (Libai et al., 2010) . This became more apparent with the rise of social media usage, where it is possible to non-verbally express attitudes about particular companies, for example by liking a particular company on Facebook or following a particular brand on Twitter (Blazevic et al., 2013) . Adopting the TSR approach, the focus of this study is on the unsolicited public feedback addressed to front-line employees since they are the main recipients of customer feedback (Lovelock and Wirtz, 2010) . Customer engagement is a growing research stream within customer management research . Acknowledged as a form of customer engagement, customer feedback can be of positive or negative valence or it can also be valence-free taking the form of suggestions and comments (Doorn et al., 2010) . We contend that 5 types of customer feedback (5Cs) can be identified: (i) positive Compliments; (ii) negative
In REF , they contribute to the literature on Transformative Service Research and customer feedback management by studying the overlooked area of positive customer feedback impact on the well-being of service entities.
Exploring the impact of customer feedback on the well-being of service entities : A TSR perspective
Journal of Service Management
Business