title: Anywhere, Anytime, Autonomous – Meeting Customer Needs in the Digital Age through Omni-Channel and Proactive Service Management
Creators: name: Wenninger, Annette
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Omni-Channel Management
subject: Proactive Services
subject: Customer Needs
subject: Digital Age
subject: 000

description: The increasing proliferation of digital technologies enables novel value propositions, closer customer relationships, and greater automation of customer-facing business processes, softening the boundaries between the physical and digital world. Whether it is a smart fridge informing customers when food is running low, digital fitting rooms in stores offering extensive knowledge about the garments, or the permanent availability of information through smart devices, the opportunities to provide a unique customer experience appear endless in the digital age. However, with these opportunities, customer behavior is also changing to favor empowered customers who determine how they interact with organizations. These empowered customers expect a seamless and personalized customer experience anytime, anywhere. Hence, organizations must shift their mindset from organizational-defined solutions to customer-oriented solutions to meet customer needs in the digital age. Against this backdrop, this cumulative doctoral thesis aims to identify pathways to fulfill customer needs based on omni-channel and proactive service management insights. Considering omni-channel management, Research Article #1 presents an economic decision model that helps organizations seamlessly manage hybrid customers moving fluently between channels by evaluating omni-channel strategies that meet customers’ channel preferences and can also be operated efficiently. Considering proactive service management, Research Article #2 analyses proactive service features through the empirical and conceptual design of a taxonomy and provides further a list of 45 examples. This taxonomy helps organizations and researchers understand the proactive service phenomenon and to identify valuable conceptualizations. Based on this research article, Research Article #3 shows that the implementation of certain proactive service features has the potential to delight customers. Organizations can, therefore, design appropriate services leading to higher customer satisfaction. The classification and prioritization of the features are determined by applying the well-established Kano model and the self-state importance method. Further, the popular Five Factor model allows investigating the influence of customers’ personality traits on the evaluation. Finally, Research Article #4 presents a contextualized acceptance model of proactive services drawn from insights of general acceptance theory to identify antecedents influencing customers’ acceptance. The results provide further indications for a tailored service design meeting customer needs. In sum, this cumulative doctoral thesis analyzes customer needs in the digital age through different theoretical lenses by using qualitative and quantitative research methods in the research field of omni-channel and proactive service management. In this regard, the research articles build upon (i.e., Kano model, Five Factor model, taxonomy design) and extend relevant theory (i.e., contextualized UTAUT2 model) to answer the different underlying research questions, whereby providing valuable empirical evidence for researchers and practitioners.