Product as a Service: Enabling Physical Products as Service End-Points

Manufacturers of consumer goods are trying to establish a direct link to consumers and to strengthen their competitive position by offering additional services. Even for simple services like a free warranty extension, manufacturers often rely on old-fashioned mailin coupons and have to encourage consumers to reach out to them over inefficient channels. We suspect that the transaction costs for initiating such relationships are prohibitively high and limit the potential. Therefore, we conducted a survey among 1012 consumers to determine the current and desired level of product-related service consumptions. Our findings suggest an increase of 22% in intention to use if search cost were reduced. In a second step, we quantify the potential of reducing search cost by developing and evaluating a mobile IS for services. The results show a potential of effort reduction by factor 11 and identify opportunities for enabling an increase in productrelated service consumption with information systems.