Leveraging Customer Information in New Service Development : An Exploratory Study Within the Telecom Industry

There is an increasing pressure on service firms to innovate and compete on new offerings. As our lives become more digitized through the ubiquitous connectivity by the usage of digital devices, companies are now able to collect vast amount of various data in real-time, and thus, know radically more about their customers. Companies could leverage on this growing body of data and developing relevant services based on customer demands accordingly. One industry compelled to benefit by utilizing customer information is the telecom industry due to fierce competition and a need of innovation in a saturated market. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate how telecom companies use customer information in their development process of new services by answering the research question: How do telecom companies use customer information within their New Service Development process? To illuminate this, a qualitative research was conducted on three Swedish telecom companies. The findings indicate that telecom companies possess a beneficial position since they are able to collect a vast amount of data about their customers due to the digital nature of their services. However, they struggle to efficiently integrate the data and seamlessly disseminate the obtained knowledge internally. Hence, leveraging customer information in new service development has not reached its full potential and how well it is incorporated is determined by the skills of key employees and their collaboration rather than deployed internal processes