Business customers’ readiness to adopt manufacturer’s new services

Abstract

Purpose For successful servitization, manufacturing firms must understand how their customers adopt new services. The purpose of this paper is to explore customers’ readiness for a manufacturer’s new services to complement its goods. The goal is to increase knowledge of the aspects that manufacturers should consider when bringing new kinds of services to market. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative case study design is used to analyze readiness for services and interest in service adoption in three customer firms of a manufacturer. The interview data were collected from 14 persons at customer sites and were content analyzed. Findings The results show that readiness – a concept that is often used in the field of technology – is relevant also for the service adoption process. In a business-to-business context, readiness for service adoption concerns the individual and organizational levels, and hence a new dimension of organizational culture and habits had to be added to the concept that originally focuses on individuals. People consider different factors when making consecutive decisions during the service adoption process and these factors can vary even within a company. The cornerstone for new service adoption is the customer firm’s actual need for the service. Originality/value The results offer new knowledge about service adoption in a business-to-business context by taking a customer firm’s perspective. They, thus, complement previous studies on the supplier perspective of servitization and service adoption in consumer business. The contributions help manufacturers focus their efforts when bringing new services to market.

Industrial customers’ organizational readiness for new advanced services

“…Service readiness was studied in an organizational context, which is rarely considered, even concerning technology readiness (Richey et al, 2007;Vize et al, 2013). Based on the work of Parasuraman (2000) and Vaittinen et al (2018), together with the current study, service readiness in an organizational context has been shown to be a multilevel concept consisting of not just individual-level dimensions, but also organizationlevel factors, as illustrated in Figure 2. These different levels are interdependent and likely to affect each other, since learning in organizations happens through their members (Kim, 1993), and individuals adapt to the beliefs of their organization (March, 1991).…”

“…This study contributes to the servitization research by utilizing and refining tested frameworks from innovation adoption research, particularly the concept of technology readiness by Parasuraman (2000), for industrial service business. It elaborates and broadens earlier ideas of the organizational aspects of service readiness (Vaittinen et al, 2018) and offers novel empirical evidence on service readiness as a relevant factor in customers' service adoption. This study revealed the components of customers' organizational service readiness, namely service context, supplier relations and organizational habits and culture.…”

“…For example, they may not happily share with a supplier the fact that they do not fully trust the supplier to handle things or keep their secrets safe. It is therefore not only important to understand whether the customer has latent needs, but also to consider service readiness, as not all customers who have a need for services will be ready to purchase them from an external suppliera finding supported by Vaittinen et al (2018). Manufacturers must therefore understand their customers and either identify those that are ready to use their services or adjust their services to fit their customers' service readiness.…”

“…Only one recent explorative study has stepped outside the technology focus and recognized readiness for new services as a relevant factor in customers' service adoption, finding that Parasuraman's (2000) existing readiness dimensions were relevant to adoption of new services (Vaittinen et al, 2018). This study also revealed organizational culture and habits as relevant organization-level dimensions of service readiness, complementing individual-level readiness factorsthe customer firms studied had established habits of doing things by themselves, and a goods-centric culture guided their service-purchasing decisions (Vaittinen et al, 2018). There is a need to understand this organizational dimension of service readiness more deeply, particularly in the context of advanced services that are clearly innovations requiring intense cooperation between manufacturer and customer.…”

“…In an industrial context, especially, the customer organization's service adoption decision making may involve both multiple individuals (e.g. initiator and influencer) ( Johnston and Bonoma, 1981) and the organization's overall willingness to outsource activities they had previously done themselves (Vaittinen et al, 2018). The context is therefore clearly different from that of consumer-centric technology adoption.…”