Wellesley, Mass…Babson Marketing Professor Dhruv Grewal has been awarded the “Best Paper” in the e-business track at the American Marketing Association’s marketing educators’ summer conference in Washington, D.C.  Grewal is the Toyota Chair of Commerce and Electronic Business Professor of Marketing at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, the top-ranked business school for entrepreneurship education.

The paper entitled, Fix It or Leave It:  Customers’ Expectation, Intention, and Reactions in Technology-Based Self-Service Failure and Recovery, was co-authored with Zhen Zhu, Suffolk University; Cheryl Nakata, University of Illinois at Chicago; and K. Sivakuman, Lehigh University.  Their research explored how consumer customers reacted and behaved following failures in “Self-Service Technology.” The two self-service technologies that they examined were car-rental kiosk interface and ATM interface.  The authors determined how technology features and customers’ individual traits influenced their cognitive and behavioral reactions.

The research data leads to a number of implications for SST managers:

•       Assume failure and encourage SST Self-Recovery with self-recovery tools, tech features that give customers choice and control, and non-SST (interpersonal) option for the “Leave” segment.
•       Focus on customer’s Expectation for Self-Recovery.
•       Bring cross-functional perspective to SST initiatives (IT, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service).

For additional information contact Professor Grewal:  dgrewal@babson.edu