Scopus journal Call for paper: Journal of Service Theory and Practice

Immersive Technologies and Sensory Service Experiences: Redefining the Customer Journey and Value Creation in the Age of AI

Achieving effective sensory-enabled digital experiences, particularly those that integrate multiple sensory modalities, represents a significant step in the generation of service experiences. The arrival of immersive technologies, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, along with Generative AI tools, marks a transformative era for reshaping how sensory-enabled service experiences, and especially multisensory ones, are designed and delivered. These technologies enable the generation of multisensory digital environments in which visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory cues interact to create rich and embodied service experiences. Beyond isolated encounters, immersive technologies increasingly operate as strategic touchpoints embedded within the customer journey, shaping how value is perceived, constructed, and realized over time.

From a service perspective, immersive technologies should not merely be understood as new digital touchpoints, but rather as sensory environments that can modify the perceptual processing of service experiences and reorganize how customers engage with service systems across multiple stages of interaction. Research in sensory marketing and perception has consistently shown that consumers do not process sensory cues in isolation; instead, they rely on cross-modal interactions and congruence between sensory modalities. Even though immersive technologies have the potential to provide multisensory experiences, existing research has mainly focused on the effects of their audio-visual features, while the integration of other sensory stimuli in immersive experiences remains limited and fragmented, particularly when considering how these sensory cues influence customer perceptions, intentions, and behaviors across different journey stages.

While immersive technologies are increasingly adopted to design digital service experiences, the potential of multisensory immersive experiences remains under-theorized and empirically underexplored from a service perspective. In particular, there is limited understanding of how different sensory cues interact within immersive service environments to shape perception and evaluation, and how these processes contribute to value creation in services, especially when immersive experiences are distributed across multiple touchpoints that collectively define the customer journey. This Special Issue seeks to address this gap by encouraging research that explicitly adopts a sensory-enabled perspective on immersive service experiences, with a particular emphasis on multisensory lenses, to examine immersive service experiences as interconnected touchpoints that redefine customer journeys and service value creation. The Special Issue aims to advance service theory while offering insights that are directly relevant for the design of effective multisensory immersive service experiences that influence customer intentions, engagement, and real behavior over time. It invites research that critically reviews existing theoretical and methodological traditions, identifies their limitations, and explores how other perspectives can enrich service research in this field. In parallel, the widespread integration.

The Special Issue aims to advance service theory while offering insights that are directly relevant for the design of effective multisensory immersive service experiences that influence customer intentions, engagement, and real behavior over time. It invites research that critically reviews existing theoretical and methodological traditions, identifies their limitations, and explores how other perspectives can enrich service research in this field. In parallel, the widespread integration of AI into immersive technologies offers new opportunities to rethink sensory-enabled and multisensory service experiences, as AI systems can augment, translate, or reconfigure sensory stimuli, facilitate more inclusive service experiences, and dynamically adapt environments to the context, behavior, or internal state of users.

List of topic areas

– Sensory-enabled immersive service experiences across the customer journey
– Multisensory cue interaction and cross-modal congruence in immersive services
– Role of immersive technologies, including VR, AR, and MR, as strategic service touchpoints
– AI-enabled adaptation, personalization, and orchestration of multisensory stimuli
– Generative AI and learning systems in immersive service design and delivery
– Customer perceptions, emotions, intentions, and real behaviors in immersive services
– Value creation and value co-creation through multisensory immersive services

Submissions Information

This special issue follows a two-step submission process:

Abstract Submissions

Authors are invited to submit their abstracts to the guest editors at cflavian@unizar.es by 1 April 2026. Abstracts will be reviewed to ensure alignment with the special issue’s theme, and authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full manuscripts.

2. Once invited, authors should submit their full manuscripts using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jostp
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.