Your company may have made a major investment in Self Service Technologies (SSTs), but how well do you understand why your customers have used the technology you have created for them – or, more importantly, why they haven’t? Most of the research related to SSTs, such as ATMs or receiving service support on-line, has focused on the features of the SST itself rather than on the attitudes of the users.
More and more companies are choosing to provide self-service technology options for their customers. Self-check-outs at supermarkets, self-check-ins at airports and online investment trading have proliferated recently, but what makes some of these “do-it-yourself” alternatives attractive to customers? And why do customers resist trying others? An article forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing (April 2005) by CSL Faculty Fellow Matthew Meuter (California State University, Chico) and CSL Marketing Faculty, Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom, and Stephen Brown investigates these issues.
Technology is dramatically and profoundly changing the nature of services by providing tremendous potential for new service offerings, radically revamping how services are delivered, and expanding the global reach of services that historically were tied to their home locations. Firms across all industries are increasingly involved in providing elements of service via technology, and some of these self-service technologies (SSTs) are more successful than others.
Black Friday shopping used to be a more chaotic and entertaining experience than it is nowadays and a large reason why things have changed has been the steady decrease in physical consumers showing up to stores. This is largely due to the soaring popularity of e-commerce which allows consumers to buy goods and services from online retailers over the internet. Despite the change from physical stores to online entities, consumers have been and will continue to be broken up into groups to better understand their shopping habits and behaviors.
In a little less than two months, this author’s cousin will get married to a fantastic woman he has been with for three years. The kicker is-and I personally can’t wait to speak to this on the big day-they met through the dating app known as Tinder. So I guess its official, they are a recent example of what’s known as positive churn. Positive churn occurs when customers’ needs are satisfied and, therefore, they terminate their service. This is much more typical in sectors of the service industry such as health care, weight loss services, and the aforementioned online dating example.
Advertising for niche versus popular products can be very different, especially in e-commerce. In order to reduce shoppers’ search costs and direct their attention to goods or services they would especially like, retailers utilize certain passive and active marketing tools. In the article, “The Effectiveness of E-tailers’ Communication Practices in Stimulating Sales of Niche Versus Popular Products,” Brinja Meiseberg explores how effective these tools are and whether the influence changes between popular and niche products.
Service providers have primarily utilized social media to generate positive word-of-mouth. However, what happens when customers spread negative reviews through online platforms, and how can service providers recover from this? In an article published in the Journal of Services Marketing, the authors observe how companies can implement service failure recovery strategies through social media, specifically Twitter.
Online retail has taken over the service industry and with new technology being consistently developed, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. One issue common among online retailers is customers’ perceived quality (PQ) decreasing upon receiving and interacting with the physical product. This ultimately leads to lower customer satisfaction and often causes financial woes for the seller (e.g. full refunds). How then can customers know if internet based quality signals are trustworthy or not?
As shopping is on its way to becoming an exclusively online process, how can retailers capture the attention of consumers in an environment where the focus is much narrower than in a physical store? In an article written by Barbara Kahn, she presents the research found to determine consumer patterns of attention and which aspects of display are most influential on purchases.
Web 2.0, otherwise known as non-static websites that focus on the ability for users to collaborate and share information, allows consumers to readily share their experiences, thoughts, and opinions with others. This shared content is referred to as electronic word of mouth (eWOM) and can be defined as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the internet”.
