Technology-Based Self-Service: From Customer Productivity Toward Customer Value

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate theconcept of customer productivity in a technology-basedself-service context (e.g., self-checkouts in grocerystores) to understand how customer productivity andcustomer value are related to each other. A preliminaryqualitative study initially explored the meaning ofcustomer productivity and the labor provided by customersin self-service shopping and TBSS environments. Based onthese exploratory insights and the extant literature, aconceptual framework was developed to identify therelationships between customer inputs into a TBSS optionand customer outputs from that option influenced bycustomer perceptions of self-service technology (SST) andcontact employee performance. Two adopter categories wereemployed for comparison purposes: enthusiastic adopters andreluctant adopters.The quantitative study utilized a survey researchdesign. After pre-testing the scale items with a largestudent sample, the latent variable structural equationmodel was tested by data collected from both enthusiastic and reluctant adopters who were customers of a largenational grocery chain.There were 27 hypotheses in total. Besides testing theproposed hypotheses, the dissertation also investigated atotal of seven potential relationships between theexploratory construct of emotional effort and the SSTperformance, contact employee performance, effort saving,time saving, quality of customer labor, quality of serviceand customer productivity.This research regarding the customer productivity andits relationship to customer value has made importantcontributions to managers and researchers by filling gapsin the productivity, retailing and services marketingliteratures.It fills certain gaps in the literature by:• introducing the new concept of customer productivityin services marketing area,• providing an understanding the concept of customerproductivity in a technology-based self-serviceenvironment,• incorporating both quantity and quality dimensionsinto inputs by customer and outputs for customer intesting multiple links toward customer productivity,• empirically testing a conceptual framework on customerproductivity,• predicting links based on the antecedents of customerproductivity, retailer support (SST and contactemployee) and the overall outcome,• establishing the link between customer productivityand customer value,• exploring the concept of emotional effort andintroducing it as a viable construct in customerproductivity,• differentiating between enthusiastic and reluctantadopters of TBSS options in general and self-checkoutsin particular.This dissertation research also provides importantimplications for managers. It contributes to the existingpractical business applications in terms of retailstrategies and tactics as concerns customers usage oftechnology-based self-service by:• presenting the emerging concept of customerproductivity as a new source of competitive advantage,• providing a unique way to create and deliver customervalue based on the concept of customer productivity –the self-productivity as perceived by customer,• differentiating between the input and output sides ofthe system for customer productivity to providefurther tactical details that can be used inimplementation phase of the crafted strategy,• differentiating between quality of customer labor andquality of service, and suggesting that thesignificant link between them can potentially be usedto develop a customer training program to acceleratethe adoption of self-checkouts by reluctant adopters,• underlining the importance of emotional effort as aviable concept that can be used as a competitive toolto increase perceived quality levels for both customerlabor and service,• providing ideas on how new generation SSTs cansuccessfully be developed based on a number ofconsequences such as contact employee performance,quality of customer labor and emotional effort,• differentiating between enthusiastic and reluctantadopters to understand what can potentially be done atstrategic and tactical levels with regard tointroducing, targeting and positioning self-checkoutsystems, other TBSS options and even technology-basedbusiness-to-business self-services