Customer Value of Service Customization

The concept "mass customization" unifies the advantages of mass production and customization. Technological advances make it possible to produce customized goods at similar costs to standardized products. Practitioners as well as researchers see mass customization as a promising source of competitive advantages. The basic assumption of mass customization is that customized products and services better meet individual needs and preferences of customers and therefore leads to higher customer value than standardized offerings. Some researchers question this assumption and refer to monetary and non-monetary sacrifices that a customer has to make in order to customize a product or service.
Research has mainly focused on operations management, concentrating on the production methods of tangible goods. Research on mass customization in the context of services is very limited and can be seen as a research gap. Since services have significantly different characteristics to products, there is a need to research the mass customization of services. Therefore, it is essential to identify and describe service customization practices. To better understand the value of service customization, there is a need to investigate what type of services and what features are suitable to what kind of customer (depending on situational influences).