E-Services: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Abstract

Services marketing research increases in both intensity and relevance as services contribute an increasing share of the world’s economy and as firms and their customers increasingly interact through electronic networks. E-services present sharp new challenges to both researchers and practitioners because the processes from beginning to end of the e-service value chain are markedly different than those for offline services and because the electronic environment offers increased flexibility throughout the value chain. This flexibility creates the requirement to impose some sort of structure on all of the possible service and channel design choices. E-service flexibility creates an opportunity, and the need, to think about the consumer early in the design process. Finally, flexibility makes it difficult, but critically important, to consider various scenarios suggesting future developments in e-services. Our goal is to provide an over-view of the past and some projections for the future in the new field of e-services.

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