The Effect of Self Service Technologies on Store Performance in Retail

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this case study is to examine the effects of the introduction of self service technologies (SSTs) on store performance. The data are collected from a Swedish multinational company and studied through difference in difference regressions. "Store performance" is assessed by studying 8 metrics selected based on the literature as well as the needs of the company. These measures are idle time, conversion rates and productivity. My main findings are that in the stores in the treatment group the introduction of SSTs increased the time to complete a transaction by an average of 8.61 seconds, increased the average time to scan an item by 5 seconds, increased the Service Gap by 35 seconds and decreased the Number of Daily Queues by 45 and the Proportion of Daily Queues by 3.4 %. These numbers sum up to be non-trivial when aggregating over the many transactions made each day. The SSTs were not found to influence conversion rates and productivity. It is possible that the effects related to idle time at least partially cancelled out, yielding no significant effect on productivity and conversion rates.