Measuring Performance Impacts of Mobile Business Services from the Customer Perspective

Abstract

Mobile technology and services are increasingly used to support workers in various industries. The goal of deploying mobile business services is to achieve various business benefits, such as cost savings, improved productivity, reachability, communication and customer satisfaction. However, research capturing the measurement of these performance impacts in mobile business service context is scarce. Therefore, the achieved impacts remain uncertain and there are no tools for measuring the impacts. In addition, there is a need to understand the contextual factors that influence the measurement of these impacts and whether the impacts can be achieved or not. This research aims to answer three research questions: 1) Which contextual factors should be taken into account when measuring the performance impacts of mobile business services? 2) Which business performance impacts should be measured? and 3) How to measure the performance impacts of mobile business services in practice? Background theories include technology and services research as well as business performance measurement that are combined and applied in the mobile business service context. This study approaches performance impacts as benefits from the customer’s point of view, including the customer organization and their employees using the services. This empirical research was conducted as action oriented case studies on three types of mobile business services in different industries and as a part of the measurement tool development process in Finland. Data was collected using interviews, observations, workshops and questionnaire. In addition, three pilot tests were conducted during measurement tool development process. The results of this research emerge by combining two parts of the dissertation: the literature discussed in the first part and the findings from five research articles included in the second part. The key findings of this research are summarized as a performance measurement design process in the mobile business context including three phases: analyzing contextual factors, identifying performance impacts and defining measures. Contextual factors are related to mobile service specific factors and more general business factors. Tangible and intangible performance impacts of mobile business services can be identified and structured into employee, structural, relational, and monetary impacts. Performance measures can be defined using direct and indirect approaches capturing objective and subjective data. This research operationalizes some of the performance impacts and applies subjective productivity measurement in practice at the employee level. The findings of this research contribute to the discussion on the measurement of services and, in particular, to measuring customer impacts of services.