Customer efficiency: Concept and its impact on service management

This dissertation investigates the impact of the increasing participation of customers in service delivery processes that has been enabled by the advances in information technology. The concept of Customer Efficiency (CE) is introduced along with a conceptual framework for Customer Efficiency Management (CEM) described in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, a game-theoretic model is developed in order to study competition among service providers when self-service is an option. The analysis of the equilibria from this model shows that, given average customer efficiency, the proportion of the service task outsourced to the customer is a decisive factor in the resulting competitive equilibria. A large-scale empirical study to investigate the impact of self-service on service delivery costs and customer-firm relationship in retail banking is described in Chapter 4. These results show that self-service through the Internet has a significant migration effect on personal service and, consequently, saves service delivery costs and improves customer efficiency. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find no evidence that increasing levels of self-service damage customer relationships.