Rethinking Multichannel Management in a Digital World - A Decision Model for Service Providers

Digitization empowers customers and creates corporate opportunities. Among others, new technology-based communication channels enable and force service providers into interacting with customers in a more target-oriented manner. Though crucially needed in practice, academic literature offers no approaches for determining a service provider’s multichannel strategy that balance the process and the customer perspective and that build on a thorough economic analysis. Academic literature neither considers individual steps of the purchase decision process nor customers’ channel switching behavior. Thus, we propose a decision model that helps determine an appropriate multichannel strategy, i.e., which steps of the purchase decision process should be supported by which channels for which service offerings. In line with value-based management, the decision model values multichannel strategies in terms of their present value cash flow effects. Finally, we demonstrate the model’s applicability using the multichannel setting of an international financial service provider as example.