Exploring the Effect of Cognitive Bias on Customer Support Services

In order to meet the increasingly more complex needs of customers and respond to decreasing product margins, product-oriented firms have developed a growing interest in extending their service business. Over the last couple of years, most product-oriented companies have explored the numerous opportunities offered by traditional customer service and product-related services. Currently, these opportunities have reached a certain level of maturity. A number of practitioners and theorists stress the growing importance of customer support services. However, the entry point to the theorizing is the observation that very few productoriented firms have already innovated customer support services successfully. In most firms, cognitive biases limit the motivation of managers to facilitate creative potential for new customer support services. In this paper, four cognitive biases are elaborated through 12 mini-cases and 8 in-depth cases. The results suggest that disbelief in the financial potential, risk aversion, tendency to set over-ambitious objectives, and fundamental attribution error plays a critical role in creating customer support services. These four ognitive biases, and the key factors in overcoming them, provide guidance for managers who aim to facilitate creative potential for customer support services.