Customer experience from a self-service system perspective

Abstract

Purpose – A service system, including self-service technologies (SSTs), should facilitate actors’ value co-creation processes to enhance customer experiences. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how customers’ experiences – both favorable and unfavorable – are formed by identifying the underlying drivers when using SSTs in the context of a self-service-based system. The authors also analyze customers’ journeys, which occur before, during, and after their experience with a self-service-based system with SSTs. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory, inductive study examines customers’ self-service experiences of using an SST. By undertaking 60 customer interviews, an event-based technique identified 200 favorable and unfavorable experienced events, which consist of activities and interactions identified through open coding guided by a theoretical framework. Customers’ experiences form through social norms and rules, referred to here as schemas. The authors sorted the drivers into four main categories of schemas (informational, relational, organizational, and technological) and into three categories: before, during, and after the store visit. Findings – The authors identified 13 favorable and unfavorable customer experience drivers that guide value co-creation and explain how the flow of value co-creation helps form customers’ experiences. Research limitations/implications – The results are limited to one self-service system context and therefore do not provide statistical generalizability. In addition, the examined company already focusses on customer experiences; other organizations may have different experience drivers. Practical implications – The results explain what is important when designing an SST-based service system. Besides, managers can promote the drivers in this research as advantages customers can gain by using self-service. Originality/value – This study offers original contributions by: first, classifying and analyzing 13 experience drivers in four categories grounded in customers’ schemas; and second, offering a new conceptualization that focusses on the formation of customers’ experiences during a value co-creation process – that is, the customer's journey – rather than on the outcome experience only.

Customer satisfaction under heterogeneous services of different self-service technologies

“…"SST" term was first introduced by Meuter et al (2000) to define "technological interfaces enabling customers to use a service without the direct involvement of service-employee". Nowadays technology interface dramatically impacts the long-term success of the business (Meuter et al, 2005;Åkesson et al, 2014) and customer interactions increased significantly. Further studies contributed to establishing the term SST which gained wide acceptance and improved classification (Curran and Meuter, 2005;Lee and Allaway, 2002;Forbes, 2008).…”

“…Interfaces of Selfservice technologies (SST) help customers to create benefits in the absence of any representative of organizations. (Beatson et al, 2007;Curran and Meuter, 2005;Åkesson et al, 2014). There are many types of SSTs such as automated teller machines (ATMs), hotel check-in/check-out kiosks, retail self-scanners, automated telephone banking and online ticketing (Ostrom et al, 2002).…”

“…SSTs help customers to change the way of accessing many services, including banking services (Bobbitt and Dabholkar, 2001). However, the adoption process of a service provided by banking differs according to the SST (Curran and Meuter, 2005;Åkesson et al, 2014). This highlights the existence of theoretical frameworks in which differences in the customer's adoption process might lead to different customer's satisfaction.…”

Defining Health Service Eco-System “Infection”: A Critical Analysis of Patient Surveys

“…Thus, service systems are interacting entities and dynamic value co-creation configuration of resources, including people, organizations, shared information (language, laws, measures, methods) and technology, internally and externally connected to other service systems by value propositions or service provisions (Spohrer, Maglio, Bailey, & Gruhl 2007). In this respect, service literature reinterpreted service systems as service eco-systems, focusing the attention on value co-creation, resource integration, emerging institutions and institutional arrangements (Åkesson, Edvardsson, & Tronvoll, 2014) as well as on tangible and intangible artifacts ability in facilitating the value co-creation process (Lusch & Spohrer, 2012). In other words, institutions (rules, norms, meanings, symbols, practices) acting as coordinating mechanisms guide, through institutional arrangements (higher-order assemblages of interrelated institutions), actors towards resource integration and service interactions (Axiom5/FP11).…”

Proposal, project, practice, pause: Developing a framework for evaluating smart domestic product engagement

“…Customers are free to move away and reengage at will from the interfaces concerned; a similar condition to that which applies to other non-domestic products with smart characteristics (e.g., Fitbit/Jawbone; Nike Plus/Adidas miCoach apps). This is perhaps why the SST diffusion-engagement canon (e.g., Hilton and Hughes 2013;Reinders, Frambach and Kleijnen 2015;Åkesson, Edvardsson and Tronvoll 2014) has tended to consider these as operand resources (things that are acted upon) rather than operant resources -entities that have causal efficacy, agency and can consequently be considered integrators of resource (Foundational Premise 9/ Axiom 4, Vargo and Lusch 2016). SDPs are, however, woven into the fabric of daily life, intended to improve the living (Wilson et al 2015) rather than just the service experience.…”