Digitalisation provides both challenges and opportunities for Quality Management (QM). The purpose of this study is to identify various roles QM practitioners play in digitalisation initiatives to uncover the challenges and potential of QM's digitalisation journey. This issue is addressed through an analytical framework that stresses two dimensions: the exploration and exploitation of digitalised QM processes and value creation, which is performed by the customer or in interactions facilitated by the provider. Through a multiple-case study of four large Swedish organisations, we propose six different challenges and corresponding roles for QM. Further, the study identifies challenges of digitalisation affecting both exploitative and explorative practices throughout an organisation's value creation process. This research contributes to the existing literature with empirical evidence on the challenges induced by digitalisation, an area often discussed but not as often studied empirically.

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Customer satisfaction information (CSI) is of great relevance for customer-oriented and service-led organisations, where customer experience is highly associated with the inuse phase of products and services. This paper explores how firms turn customer satisfaction information into knowledge and actions in a manner that enables service improvements. Based on a study of 24 organisations in six different service sectors, this study investigates CSI usage with respect to absorptive capacity. The paper concludes that efficient CSI usage requires multiple sources of customer satisfaction data that need to be used broadly in the organisation by creating accountability of employees across the organisation, rather than CSI being an issue for the communication function. To release this potential, CSI usage requires mechanisms that reside within the organisation, including ensuring actionability of initiatives, assignment of responsibility for actions and follow up, and providing incentives to mobilise change support. Further, the paper shows that in order to fully understand CSI, research must move beyond focusing on processes and activities to study the underlying capacities needed to release the potential of CSI to serve as a basis for service improvements.

PurposeThe purpose is to understand how the role of quality functions might evolve amidst digitalisation and an increased focus on services. This study focuses on customer feedback and how it can function as activation triggers for developing absorptive capacity, as well as how it relates to the value creation processes.Design/methodology/approachFollowing a qualitative research design, the authors gathered primary data from interviews with quality managers at 17 UK and Swedish firms and triangulated it with secondary information from the firms' web pages.FindingsThe findings show that customer feedback-based activation triggers can support development of absorptive capacity in the quality function if there are established processes for acting on customer feedback. This is often the case for codified feedback, which normally concerns products. However, digitalisation offers new opportunities of engaging in value co-creation, and firms need to develop digital capabilities to manage new technologies and data analytic tools. For personalised feedback (the main category of service-related feedback), established processes are missing.Originality/valueThis study work contributes to knowledge about how quality functions respond to customer feedback on both products and services. It clarifies why the quality function sometimes struggles to contribute to service quality as much as to product quality. From a theory development perspective, the authors contribute to understanding customer feedback-based activation triggers, how they lead to development of absorptive capacity and their relation to value co-creation on a functional level.