A critical challenge for modern service industries is providing high levels of customer service while minimizing service delivery costs. This is especially true for transaction oriented consumer service businesses such as retail banking, brokerage, package transport, and retail trade in which consumers can have frequent and multiple points of contact with an organization. One significant service innovation over the last decade is the use of information technology to support customer self-service. A well designed multi-channel service delivery system, including both customer-provided self-service and employee-provided full-service, can simultaneously lower costs and improve service quality, as well as create related benefits such as increased customer retention. The profound impact of this proliferation of self-service is evident in the strong growth of the so-called "self-service economy" that involves almost all major service industries as well as the service operations of manufacturers.
While offering multiple service channels is generally viewed as a competitive necessity in many industries, there is a considerable amount of discretion on the design and management of self-service channels. Our research will specifically focus on the role of the customer in service co-production, drawing on customer efficiency. Efficient customers are able to co-produce required services at a low cost and therefore will tend to disproportionately utilize self-service channels when it is feasible for a given service need. Therefore, it has become important to measure and improve customer efficiency for successful service delivery that features technology-enabled self-service.
We investigate a series of issues in regard to the design and management of a multi-channel service delivery system featuring self-service technology in the retail banking industry, an industry at the forefront of this transformation. Through alliances forged with industry participants, we have access to data of unprecedented scale and scope on customer utilization of banking service channels and active participation of senior management at our partner institutions to maximize the contribution to industry practice. The expected insights from this work can be readily extended to other service industries as well as government institutions, service and support operations in manufacturing firms, and non-commercial organizations seeking to improve their service operations by offering self-service.
