“Deal with it”: How coping with e-service innovation affects the customer experience

E-service customers have myriad alternatives, so they can easily reduce their use of an e-service or switch to competitors. To enhance existing customers' experiences and convince them to persist in their usage, companies often introduce new versions of e-services. However, the changes resulting from such incremental innovations can be effortful for customers to learn and potentially even ruin their experiences. If e-service providers want to avoid losing existing customers, they must understand how customers deal with the changes introduced by incremental innovations and the resulting impacts on the customer experience, with both the innovation and the e-service in general. To address these research questions, the current study proposes a conceptual model based on service innovation, appraisal and coping, and customer experience theories and empirically tests it with data from two quantitative studies. The results show that incremental changes in existing e-services affect the cumulative customer experience, but firms introducing such innovations can encourage certain coping strategies (e.g., problem-focused) to leverage different dimensions of the encounter experience (e.g., usefulness of the new version, pleasure in using it).