Using Digital Service Inventories to Create Customer Value

Technology continues to affect today’s businesses in general and services in particular. With the globalization of business, service organizations have access to many of the same external resources. As a result, services must look internally to how they design their delivery processes to increase the value of their offerings. One element that appears to offer such opportunities is the creation of service inventories in the design of the service delivery process. We define service inventory as any tangible or intangible operand resource that is transformed by the service provider with or without customer input and is stored prior to the customer’s arrival. The goal of service inventories is to facilitate the steps in the service delivery process, thereby creating customer value during the service encounter. Within this context, service inventories can be either physical or digital; we focus primarily on the creation of digital service inventories and how they add value for both the provider and the customer.We introduce a framework that relates the degree of customer interaction and the degree of service inventory differentiation to operational “stickiness.” Our objective is to acknowledge the increasing role of technology in the delivery of services, and we discuss how services can leverage this technology by incorporating service inventories into the design of their delivery processes. The resulting synergy from both increasing the level of customer interaction during the value cocreation process and creating service inventories (both of which are integral elements in our framework) provides firms with increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.