Exploring customer needs from a digital healthcare service

Sammanfattning: Cost-effectively capturing and understanding customer needs allows a firm to stay synchronized with the market, to stay ahead of competitors, and to enable service innovation. Traditional qualitative market research methods, such as interviews and focus groups are well-known methods for identifying and capturing customer needs but can be costly, tedious, time-consuming, and can require intensive collaboration with customers. As social media platforms become increasingly central in customers' daily lives, they can become valuable sources for identifying and capturing customer needs. The process of using social media content in market research is called netnography. In this thesis, the instrumental case to study customer needs is from a healthcare context.The healthcare system is an interesting illustrative case because it struggles with satisfying customers' needs – due to the difficulty of delivering high-quality services across multiple channels and devices, to secure customers' data, and to offer customized human-centred care. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this thesis is, by taking on a customer-centric view, to contribute to a better understanding of the quality of digital services. To fulfil this purpose, two research questions are formulated and answered. The first research question concerns the differences and outcomes between netnography and focus groups when capturing customers' needs. Formally, it is formulated as: What are the differences and outcomes between netnography and focus groups when capturing customers' needs? The second research question concerns the customer value cocreation activities and qualities necessary in a digital healthcare service to satisfy customers' needs. Formally, it is formulated as: What customer value cocreation activities and qualities satisfy customers' needs in a digital healthcare service? Taking customer-centric views, findings from three papers and empirical data from a survey, netnography, and a focus group project are used to shed light on the theoretical entity of customer needs – which is the unit of analysis.The contextual differences between netnography and focus groups are related to the embedded rules, norms, and space-time conditions. Such conditions pattern the information about the service and customers' needs. The netnography method captures sociohistorical-patterned information about more critical events, and realistic and negative service encounters. When capturing customers' needs, the netnography method captures more dominant, unmet, and actual (real time) needs. The focus group method captures transcultural-patterned information about more positive, memorable, and ordinary service encounters. When capturing customers' needs, the focus group method captures more evenly distributed, met (satisfied), and memorable needs. Most surprisingly, both methodologies capture, almost, the same needs. However, the proportion of needs discussed across the two samples is significantly different. The netnography method did not capture the needs of "system capacity" and "access". The focus groups method did not capture the need of corporate "responsibility".A conceptual model is illustrating four value creating activities and quality bundles necessary to deliver customer-determined benefits. The conceptual model is a synthesis of the customer journey, perceived electronic service quality and value concept – and provides a new, integrative view of customers' perceptions of digital healthcare service. The model gives a comprehensive understanding of what makes service journeys superior and supportive, and how service providers can optimize the customer experiences – which includes perceptions of personal health and well-being. This thesis offers several important conclusions for quality management. Broadly speaking, the thesis raises an awareness of the importance of the continuous variables – rules, norms, and space-time conditions – which pattern research data or information about the service and customers' needs. The conceptual model can guide managers on how to allocate resources – and that is to design high-quality service encounters.