The customer takes over the center stage of tomorrow’s economy. In the wake of customer-centric service industries, traditional intermediaries are becoming increasingly obsolete and are substituted by self-services. Additionally, because of the on-going digitalization, e-services provide various alternatives to the customer. Thus, self-directed customers must overlook and manage an increasingly complex network of services and providers themselves. Technology is a central factor in this context. On the one hand, it is the leading cause of the current challenges whereby, on the contrary, it is the key to solving them.
This work proposes the concept of Customer-centric Service Management (CSM). It is an interdisciplinary approach to adopt the service composition process from the field of business and IT to the particularities of consumers. Combining modular services to individualized and valuable service bundles is its objective. Making this type of interaction accessible for consumers requires a substantial reduction of complexity in the front end. The key to achieving this is by taking an outside-in perspective. This means understanding the decision process of the customer and speaking his language in a field that has been dominated by formal description standards and product parameters for a long time.
This work hypothesizes that a paradigm-shift enables consumer-driven service com-position. Thus, the concept of customer-centricity is applied to service management. By letting the consumer describe himself, respectively his distinct needs and requirements, a better customer value is achieved than by traditional product-centric approaches. Unlike existing product-centric configuration tools, customer-centric configurators do not elicit product parameters. Instead, they rely on a structured description of customers’ intentions and values captured in a domain specific customer model. Consequently, the concept applies to a more abstract level of service categories instead of specific product instances. This refers to the pre-purchase phase of the consumer journey – a phase that is widely neglected by academia and practice yet.
This work analyzes the concept of CSM on a technical, process-related, and strategic level. Three elements are identified as the core of CSM: the customer model, the service model, and the composition logic. Each item is elaborated in detail at the example of financial services.
The concept of CSM facilitates current knowledge from different fields of research and finally implements them into a prototype. This demonstrator is the basis for a large field experiment to answer two questions: in the first place, does customer-centric service composition provide higher customer value regarding perceived complexity, solution utility and process utility? Moreover, secondly, does a reduced complexity, in respect of the amount of information that needs to be handled, with-out changing the configuration paradigm, have a greater impact on customer value?
Empirical validation shows that the customer-centric approach has significant ad-vantages over the product-centric one. It offers higher customer value with respect to perceived complexity, perceived solution utility and perceived user experience. This proves the high potential of this concept. The findings of this thesis form the basis of a new form of customer interaction and enable new business models.:1 Introduction
1.1 Initial Situation and Problem
1.2 Contribution and Research Question
1.3 Research Approach
1.4 Thesis Structure
2 Foundations
2.1 Services
2.2 Complexity
2.3 Individualization
2.4 Service Management
3 Conceptualization of Customer-centric
Service Management
3.1 Customer-centric Service Management
3.2 Customer Model
3.3 Service Model
3.4 Service Composition Logic
4 Empirical Validation
4.1 Objectives
4.2 Conceptualization
4.3 Prototype
4.4 Experiment Design and Empirical Testing
4.5 Data Analysis and Results
5 Results, Evaluation and Outlook
5.1 Summary and Results
5.2 Customer-centric Service Management as a Business-Model –
Practical Startup Experiences
5.3 Outlook and Impact of CSM
5.4 Limitations and Need for Future Research
6 References
Curriculum Vitae
Bibliographic Data
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:32086 |
| Date | 05 November 2018 |
| Creators | Sachse, Stephan |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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