| The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the concept of customer productivity in a technology-based self-service context (e.g., self-checkouts in grocery stores) to understand how customer productivity and customer value are related to each other. A conceptual framework was developed to identify the relationships between customer inputs into a TBSS option and customer outputs from that option influenced by customer perceptions of self-service technology (SST) and contact employee performance. Two adopter categories were employed for comparison purposes: enthusiastic adopters and reluctant adopters.; The latent variable structural equation model was tested by data collected from both enthusiastic and reluctant adopters who were customers of a large national grocery chain. The dissertation also investigated a total of seven potential relationships between the exploratory construct of emotional effort and the SST performance, contact employee performance, effort saving, time saving, quality of customer labor, quality of service and customer productivity.; This research has made important contributions to managers and researchers by filling gaps in the productivity, retailing and services marketing literatures; namely (1) introducing the new concept of customer productivity in services marketing area as a new source of competitive advantage, (2) providing an understanding of the concept of customer productivity, and establishing its link to customer value in a technology-based self-service environment, (3) incorporating both quantity and quality dimensions into inputs by customer and outputs for customer in testing multiple links toward customer productivity, (4) empirically testing a conceptual framework on customer productivity, (5) predicting links based on the antecedents of customer productivity, retailer support (SST and contact employee) and the overall outcome, (6) exploring the concept of emotional effort that can be used as a competitive tool to increase perceived quality, and introducing it as a viable construct in customer productivity, (7) differentiating between enthusiastic and reluctant adopters of TBSS options in general and self-checkouts in particular, (8) differentiating between quality of customer labor and quality of service, and suggesting that the significant link between them can potentially be used to develop a customer training program to accelerate the adoption of self-checkouts by reluctant adopters. |
