Involvement Practices in Persuasive Service Encounters: the Case of Home Security Advice

Advisors providing non-commercial service encounters are neither trained nor explicitly incentivized to persuade the advisee. However, a whole range of encounters may benefit from enhanced persuasiveness to prevent the advisee from taking counterproductive decisions. Persuasion literature from the field of social psychology points to the persuadee’s involvement as a central factor of persuasive effect. Nevertheless, little is known on how persuader addresses persuadee’s involvement and how those efforts can be supported by means of modern technology, especially in the non-commercial service encounters. Based on a detailed analysis of experimental service encounters and supported by the in situ studies of real advisory sessions, this study identifies a set of involvement practices, i.e., conversational practices that advisors engage in when trying to improve the advisee’s involvement and illustrates how these practices can be afforded with modern multimedia technology. Thereby, the manuscript proposes to bridge the notions of involvement from the conversation studies and from the persuasion literature. By pointing to the influence of IT on persuasive behaviour in service encounters, it brings together the concept of persuasive technology and service support as a subfield of IS. The manuscript offers novel perspective for framing the conversations and the practices in service encounters.