The corona pandemic’s impact on the sales-function and the sales-associates ability to create value during a crisis : An exploratory study on the mobile-operator sector in Sweden

Sammanfattning: The amount of people in Sweden who were made redundant during the corona pandemic exceeds both the Swedish financial crisis in 1990 and the global financial crisis in 2008.  The negative economic development led to more pressure on people to work harder and perform better in order for their firm to survive. The purpose of this thesis was to explore if and how the value creation process between service providers and their customers, from a business perspective, had been influenced by the corona pandemic.  A conceptual model based on service-logic was created to shed light on potential disruptions affecting the value creation. Empirical data was collected through qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews with sales-associates employed by a mobile-operator firm in Sweden. Findings resulted in five main insights of disruptions that impact the provider and its value-creation with its customers. These include managerial decisions, unreasonable goal-setting, social distancing, new provider-customer frictions and foot-traffic, which all stemmed from decisions taken by the firm and government restrictions.   This dissertation has contributed to additional insights in how the service-logic and its various concepts regarding value creation, from a firm’s perspective, is affected during a major crisis. The difficulties experienced by sales-associates during the corona pandemic is two-fold. The sales-associates have to adhere to decisions made by the firm which often leads to more pressure to perform, and the restrictions implemented by governments leads to poor conditions for creating customer-relationships in turn. These conditions impact the firm’s ability to facilitate and co-create value with its customers.