Prosumers as service configurators — vision, status and future requirements

Abstract

From a vendor’s point of view, e-commerce can facilitate new models of division of labor, which typically encompass a higher level of involvement on the customer’s, specifically consumer’s, end. In order to over one shortcomings in computer-mediated communications, numerous individualization or personalization features have been added to e-commerce applications. In the telecommunication industry, as one prominent example, increasingly self-service portals have been established which provide administrative functions such as billing status, change of tariff or billing address. More advanced features such as unified messaging are even more customer specific and are beneficial inasmuch as they are regularly adapted to the individual, situation specific needs. However, in contrast to the vendor’s expectations, these features have not been well received and adopted by customers so far (e.g. Yahoo’s personalization features (Manber et al. 2000)). We have conducted several experiments with mobile phone users, which showed two major shortcomings: firstly, many functions were not known at all and, secondly, the usability of the Web portal was very limited. These findings must be quite troubling for the vendors as ongoing innovations in the telecommunications industry are leading to a need for even more user involvement: e.g. location based services require adaptable and regularly updated consumer profiles in order to provide satisfying results. Based on the dilemma between the limited success of self-service offering to date and extended requirements in the near future, the paper will report on findings about the acceptance of customer self service portals, analyze and frame the trend towards increasing user participation in advanced telecommunication services, and discuss implications for service providers. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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