Suchergebnisse

Remote services represent a young, but already important and fast growing form of technology-mediated services, . Stefanie Paluch employs multiple qualitative methods to explore the perception of remote services and its impact on customer-provider relationships in USA, Germany and Sweden. She develops a comprehensive model about customers' holistic remote service experience and derives theoretical propositions that reflect main influence factors. Based on the empirical data, she generates managerial implications for remote service providers on how to increase the technology adoption and reinforce the relationships with their customers in high-technology environments

Remote services are often provided without customer-provider contact for remote diagnostics, repair, and maintenance purposes in business-to-business industries such as information technology, medical health care, and mechanical engineering. Two empirical studies (Studies 1 and 2) suggest that numerous characteristics of remote services are critical to customer satisfaction: (1) security, (2) reliability, (3) level of process integration, (4) economic benefit, (5) post-provision documentation, (6) exchange options, (7) individualization, and (8) support services. Study 3 revealed a paradox that complicates service provision—a situation in which customers experience ambivalent feelings toward service separation as associated with remote services. They express (i) a strong desire to be part of the remote service provision in order to maintain control over the process, while at the same time, (ii) for personal and contractual reasons they do not want to be integrated into the process. Satisfaction levels were found to vary depending on how customers assess physical and mental service separation. We identified service initiation as a situational factor influencing the shift from a positive to a negative assessment of service separation. To prevent customer dissatisfaction, service providers should integrate customers into service provision for provider-initiated services, whereas for customer-initiated services they should not bring the customer in.

The use of service robots is on the rise. Characterized by technology autonomy with a physical embodiment, service robots have a higher level of social presence than other service technologies. This research focuses on one specific phenomenon of such social encounters: attribution of responsibility. Study 1 explores potential antecedents driving the attribution of responsibility in encounters with service robots. We derive a research model, which is tested and expanded in three subsequent scenario-based experiments. In Study 2, we find that technology's autonomy decreases perceived behavioral control over the service robot, which in turn decreases perceived responsibility for positive outcomes but not for negative outcomes. Study 3 indicates that perceived ownership of the service robot accounts for the high responsibility for negative outcomes irrespective of perceived behavioral control. In Study 4, we show that the potential to interrupt the service robots' autonomy increases perceived behavioral control and perceived responsibility for positive outcomes. Our results propose theoretical implications for responsibility perceptions and practical implications for customer satisfaction with service robots.