Understanding customer values and service needs within the truck industry
(2011) TMA820 20111Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- Tutors:
Stefan U Klingberg, Director Strategic Planning, Scania CV AB
Ulf Paulsson, Ph.D in Engineering, Department of Business Administration
Malin Olander Roese, Department of Design Sciences, LTH
Issue of study:
Services dominate the economy of today why it becomes essential for companies to add value through services. Still many companies fail to do so. The main reason is existing knowledge gaps between customers and suppliers. When having a knowledge gap, companies may not always know what the customer wants in terms of service, which leads to non-optimal solutions for customers. However, there exist no theories describing how to best work on identifing and focus on customer values and service needs within the truck industry.... (More) - Tutors:
Stefan U Klingberg, Director Strategic Planning, Scania CV AB
Ulf Paulsson, Ph.D in Engineering, Department of Business Administration
Malin Olander Roese, Department of Design Sciences, LTH
Issue of study:
Services dominate the economy of today why it becomes essential for companies to add value through services. Still many companies fail to do so. The main reason is existing knowledge gaps between customers and suppliers. When having a knowledge gap, companies may not always know what the customer wants in terms of service, which leads to non-optimal solutions for customers. However, there exist no theories describing how to best work on identifing and focus on customer values and service needs within the truck industry.
Purpose:
The purpose of this master thesis is to increase knowledge of how to identify and compile customer values and service needs within the truck industry in order to create more customized service offers.
Method:
The research methodology is constructed as an abductive approach. It has retained flexibility in the research, where creative iterative processes of theory knowledge and empirical study have been possible.
The main approach of this thesis has been of qualitative character. The reason for choosing a qualitative method is to enable the capturing of more detailed and in-depth information in order to denote non-obvious needs. Both primary and secondary data are used.
Conclusions:
A framework called CDIS (Customer-value Drivers Identification within Services) have been created in order to identify and compile customer values and service needs within the truck industry to create more customized service offers. The CDIS-framework consists of the most important customer-value drivers, defined as parameters, which all have underlying attributes. The attributes demonstrate the most essential characteristics within each parameter. The parameters affect customer´s preferences in the decision process of services. By getting more detailed information of these parameters valuable information of customer values and service needs can be captured. This will help suppliers to propose more customized service offers.
Inspirations for the CDIS-framework were gathered from information about the truck industry and especially Scania and different theories covering everything from service management to models of how customer values and needs can be captured. A customer study was made in order to deepen and test the CDIS-framework which gave opportunities to refine the framework.
The CDIS-framework can not only be used in the long-haulage application but also be generalized to other applications within the truck industry and to resemble industries with the same distribution between products and services. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/1974491
- author
- Dahlberg, Louise LU and Stridsberg, Karin
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- TMA820 20111
- year
- 2011
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Services, Service Management, Customer orientation, Customer needs, Customer values, Customer-value drivers, Customized Solutions, Solutions provider
- language
- English
- id
- 1974491
- date added to LUP
- 2011-07-25 10:05:28
- date last changed
- 2011-07-25 10:05:28
@misc{1974491,
abstract = {{Tutors:
Stefan U Klingberg, Director Strategic Planning, Scania CV AB
Ulf Paulsson, Ph.D in Engineering, Department of Business Administration
Malin Olander Roese, Department of Design Sciences, LTH
Issue of study:
Services dominate the economy of today why it becomes essential for companies to add value through services. Still many companies fail to do so. The main reason is existing knowledge gaps between customers and suppliers. When having a knowledge gap, companies may not always know what the customer wants in terms of service, which leads to non-optimal solutions for customers. However, there exist no theories describing how to best work on identifing and focus on customer values and service needs within the truck industry.
Purpose:
The purpose of this master thesis is to increase knowledge of how to identify and compile customer values and service needs within the truck industry in order to create more customized service offers.
Method:
The research methodology is constructed as an abductive approach. It has retained flexibility in the research, where creative iterative processes of theory knowledge and empirical study have been possible.
The main approach of this thesis has been of qualitative character. The reason for choosing a qualitative method is to enable the capturing of more detailed and in-depth information in order to denote non-obvious needs. Both primary and secondary data are used.
Conclusions:
A framework called CDIS (Customer-value Drivers Identification within Services) have been created in order to identify and compile customer values and service needs within the truck industry to create more customized service offers. The CDIS-framework consists of the most important customer-value drivers, defined as parameters, which all have underlying attributes. The attributes demonstrate the most essential characteristics within each parameter. The parameters affect customer´s preferences in the decision process of services. By getting more detailed information of these parameters valuable information of customer values and service needs can be captured. This will help suppliers to propose more customized service offers.
Inspirations for the CDIS-framework were gathered from information about the truck industry and especially Scania and different theories covering everything from service management to models of how customer values and needs can be captured. A customer study was made in order to deepen and test the CDIS-framework which gave opportunities to refine the framework.
The CDIS-framework can not only be used in the long-haulage application but also be generalized to other applications within the truck industry and to resemble industries with the same distribution between products and services.}},
author = {{Dahlberg, Louise and Stridsberg, Karin}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Understanding customer values and service needs within the truck industry}},
year = {{2011}},
}