Onboarding and Agency: Responding to Episodic Loneliness in Immersive Services

ABSTRACT Loneliness is a growing concern in long‐duration immersive services, where consumers not only transition into the service but also experience multiple identity transitions and life events while in the service. We argue that loneliness in these settings emerges not only as a chronic experience from a lack of social opportunities, but also episodically from difficulty navigating social landscapes after a life change. Drawing on consumer agency as a differentiating factor between aloneness and loneliness, we reconceptualize onboarding as a dynamic, multi‐actor process through which providers and co‐consumers restore agency and address loneliness throughout the service experience. Using qualitative evidence from retirement villages and residential aged care, we examine the onboarding structures supporting agency within these later‐life immersive services. Onboarding unfolds in three phases, the third of which returns as a cycle: pre‐service experience, initial transition, and cycles of integration and transition. These phases involve distinct social support types (action‐facilitating and nurturant) delivered by individual, vertical (organizational), and horizontal (co‐consumer) actors. Crucially, changes in consumer context create a need for re‐onboarding to foster agency and mitigate loneliness. Comparing the two service settings reveals onboarding stages require different actors, sequencing, and intensity depending on entry conditions. We contribute a dynamic, agency‐centered conceptualization of onboarding and provide guidance for resource allocation to mitigate loneliness risk.