Customers As Competitors:
A final role played by service customers is that potential competitor. If self service customer can be viewed as resource of the firm, or as “ partial employees”, self service customers could, in some cases partially perform the service or perform the entire service for themselves and not need the provider at all.customes thus in a sense are competitors of the companies that supply the service. Whether to produce a service for themselves.
E.G. child care, home maintenance, car repair or have someone else provide the service for them is a common dilemma for consumers.
Similar internal versus external exchange decisions are made by organizations firms frequently choose to outsource service activities such as payroll, data processing, research, accounting, maintenance and facilities management. They find that it is advantageous to focus on their core businesses and leave these essential support services to other with geater expertise, alternatively, a firm may decide to stop purchasing services externally & bring the service production process-in-house.
The important thing to remember from this is that in many service scenarios customers can and do choose to fully or partially produce the services themselves. Thus, in addition to recognizing that customers can be productive resources and concretors of quality and value, organizations also need to recognize the customers’ role as a potential competition.
64 Comments