Essays on customer experience in access-based services

Guide(s)

Shainesh, G

Department

Marketing

Area

Marketing

University

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Place

Bangalore

Publication Date

3-31-2023

Year Awarded

March 2023

Year Completed

March 2023

Year Registered

June 2017

Abstract

Customer Experience is a critical marketing construct and of growing interest to both researchers and practitioners alike. Recent research on customer experience highlights the importance and need for understanding the construct from the perspective of multi-actor settings (De Keyser et al., 2020; Eckhardt et al., 2019). An equally relevant and growing area of interest to marketers is access-based services. Access-based services is a classic example of multi-actor settings that brings together distinct actors and actor systems to jointly provide service and cocreate value with the main beneficiary, the customer. This dissertation titled, ‘Essays on Customer Experience in Access-Based Services’ brings together two burgeoning areas of marketing, customer experience (CX) and access-based services (ABS) and comprises three essays. In the first essay, I conceptualize customer experience for access-based services. Based on previous research and using value cocreation as a theoretical lens (Becker & Jaakkola, 2020; De Keyser et al., 2020; Jaakkola et al., 2015; McColl-Kennedy et al., 2019; S. L. Vargo & Lusch, 2008, 2016; S. Vargo & Lusch, 2018), I derive specific value cocreating drivers of CX in ABS. These drivers include guarantees and verification mechanisms, signaling mechanisms, customer redressal mechanisms, technological robustness, social validation mechanisms for the ABS platform, resources, processes, interactions and ambiance for the ABS providers. Finally, I present a set of future research agendas for the domain. The second essay focuses on the ABS providers as stakeholders to examine the nuances of how CX impacts provider performance. Specifically, I examine how platformbased interventions such as signaling iinfluencethe impact of CX on provider performance. My results indicate that providers who are signaled as superior on the platform outperform non-signaled providers on interpersonal and interactional components of the experience. Drivers such as resources and processes have a greater chance of influencing negative CX than positive CX. Using textual big data, the essay uses text-mining approaches to study the impact of CX on provider performance. The analyses show that the performance of non-signaled providers is hurt relatively more than signaled providers. However, this effect is reduced in the presence of high valence of reviews. On the other hand, signaled providers benefit relatively more from positive CX than non-signaled providers, especially when the variance of reviews is high. The essay also presents financial calculations of each of the value cocreating drivers on provider performance and has implications for managing customer experience for both providers and the platform. The third essay examines the impact of customer experience on the ABS platform. Specifically, I examine how the experience with third-party providers spillsover to the evaluations towards the ABS platform. Using randomized-controlled experiments, my results show that the spillover of negative CX is relatively more from signaled providers than non-signaled providers, but no significant difference exists in the case of positive CX. This effect is explained through the perceived fit between the platform’s claim and provider’s service. These effects are moderated in the presence of the perceived platform-provider independence and the customer’s risk attitude. The findings highlight the asymmetric consequences of signaling interventions for the ABS platform and have implications for platform’s signaling strategies. This thesis examines the various nuances of CX from the perspective of all the stakeholders of CX. The first essay conceptualizes CX as a customer-centric construct and identifies how value cocreation processes with other actors in the service ecosystem act as drivers of CX in ABS. Through this, the novel framework in essay 1 extends existing CX research, provides an overview of the drivers of CX, and points to various actions that managers can take to influence CX. The framework helps managers to understand better the roles and areas for improvement of CX at both provider and platform touchpoints. In the second essay, the focus of the research shifts to the peer provider as an important stakeholder in the ABS system. The research examines the impact of CX on peer-provider performance. Moreover, the essay specifically examines this effect in the presence of platform-based interventions, since the three entities (customer, provider, and platform) are constantly interacting. The managerial implications of the results point to ways of reallocating budgets and incentivizing certain types of providers for improving CX. The results also indicate strategies for reducing provider churn in the case of lowered performance due to negative CX. Finally, the third essay focuses on the platform as a stakeholder and suggests alternative ways in which a platform can avoid receiving the blame of negative CX depending on the type of consumer market. Future work can extend this research in the following ways. First, researchers use our framework and identify ways in which customer experience would differ for platforms that engage in not-for-profit work. For instance, platforms such as Ketto and DonateKart are types of ABS where donation, rather than purchase, characterizes the mode of value exchange. Therefore, fundamental differences in how value is perceived may arise in such contexts, which future researchers can examine. Second, our findings show asymmetric effects of CX on provider performance. This can be extended by testing alternative signaling mechanisms used by platforms to compare and contrast similar asymmetric effects. The number of access-based businesses are increasing rapidly in emerging economies. So, future research can also compare and contrast our findings across developed and emerging markets.

Pagination

xii, 159p.

Copyright

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Document Type

Dissertation

DAC Chairperson

Shainesh, G

DAC Members

Jonnalagedda, Sreelata; Soundararajan, Vidhya

Type of Degree

Ph.D.

Relation

DIS-IIMB-FPM-P23-07

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