Scan to Satisfaction : A qualitative approach: How the self-scanning technology affects the customer participation process and its outcomes.

Sammanfattning: Abstract In a constantly changing retail market environment, in which technology is observed as a key to strengthening the competitive advantage of the companies, self-service technology is in the center of the customer participation, and its resulting benefits are the task of this research to identify them. A few researchers have conducted a qualitative approach to understand the relationship between customer participation and its outcomes, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The purpose of this research is to gain further understanding of the influence of self-service technologies, in particular, the self-scanner technology in the service delivery process from the customer perspective. The purpose of our paper is to explore the consequences and benefits of customer participation. Therefore, we are specifically looking at the self-scanning technology and the self-service checkout in grocery retailing. Furthermore, we discovered how factors such as service quality, product quality and price are affected by customer participation and how these factors, in turn, are related to two outcomes, such as customer satisfaction and loyalty. In respect of the purpose, we were conducting eleven in-depth interviews to answer the research questions. The developed interview guideline was constructed with the help of the already existing literature. Overall, the goal of the research is to link two different theoretical models and to gain a deeper understanding of the academic implications from the customer's point of view, when connecting these two models. The result of the research demonstrates the benefits of customer participation including the influencing factors such as service quality, product quality and price are causing a relationship between self-scanning technology and customer satisfaction. We identified that the self-scanning technology was causing a higher customer satisfaction. Additionally, we found that the self-scanning technology is not related to the creation of customer loyalty because receiving the student discount with the ICA Banken card was an important factor which made the participants loyal to ICA. But the scanner is a feature which is affecting the decision-making process of participants to choose ICA Maxi as their store of preference.