The Impact of Digital Technologies on Services Characteristics: Towards Digital Servitization

Despite that digital technologies play a fundamental role in enabling innovation in service delivery processes, the understanding of how they influence services characteristics, and service provider – customer interactions still remains a critical point. On these premises, this paper introduces a study to explore such influences, through the adoption of a two-dimensional matrix, representing a service provider – customer interaction typology, and describing how digital technologies influence the five main services characteristics (viz. intangibility, inventory, inseparability, inconsistency, and involvement). The matrix was built upon a literature review, and further refined through brainstorming sessions with researchers and practitioners. The results found suggest that digital servitization, the “digital transformation of services”, brings about new dynamics in service provider – customer interactions by impacting on the service delivery processes elements. For this reason, the achieved matrix can help service researchers and managers to understand how digital technologies increase/decrease the presence and the role of the service provider in a service delivery process, and the presence and the role of the customer of the service in a service delivery itself.