Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Self-service technologies (SSTs) are technological interfaces that enable customers to take advantage of a service without any service employee involvement (Meuter, Ostrom, Roundtree, & Bitner, 2000). As the introduction of SSTs opens up the potential of improving productivity and service quality while cutting cost, more and more service providers have introduced these technologies in the interface between companies and customers (Weijters, Rangarajan, Falk, & Schillewaert, 2007). However, the substitution of human contact with SSTs is not always as successful as expected (Salomann, Kolbe, & Brenner, 2005). Since personal service is the cornerstone of most service industries, removing the human contact may cause the potential hazard in developing customer relationships (Selnes & Hansen, 2001). It is impossible today to design a SST interface that may replace personal interaction. All customers have experienced the mishaps of misapplied technology, which often has no discernible benefit for the customer experience and sometimes even erodes it (Rayport, Jaworski, & Kyung, 2005). As thus, cold hard SSTs can help service providers remove the bottlenecks, but cannot replace service personnel entirely. Binter, Brown and Meuter (2000) argue that it is important to retain the traditional low-tech, high-touch approach as a viable option for customers when moving towards enabling technology use in service encounters. Selnes and Hansen (2001) indicate that transformation from personal service to self-service is not necessarily a change from a personal to an impersonal relationship but a change from personal service to a mix of personal and self-service. As to the double-edged sword of SSTs, the strategic question facing companies is how to effectively distribute the relationship building roles between humans and machines in a way that capitalizes on the strengths of each (Rayport et al., 2005).