Customer value creation through multi-purpose service-robot-enabled solutions

The megatrends’ servitisation, digitalisation and robotisation are rapidly changing our business environment (e.g., Parviainen et al., 2017; Olaf & Hanser, 2019; Frank et al., 2019). The shift from selling physical goods to selling digital, robot-enabled solutions, is taking place among many companies in various business fields, giving the companies an opportunity to develop new services with new kinds of value creation possibilities for their customers. In this study, we focus on multi-purpose service-robot-enabled solutions. The main idea is that the multi-purpose service robots can serve several companies and perform multiple activities in their functional environment, e.g., material handling, security surveillance, cleaning and guidance. The customers are buying robot-enabled solutions instead of investigating into service robots as such. The motivation behind the idea of multi-purpose robots lies in gaining a higher utilisation rate for the service robots and making the sales and use of the robots more profitable and cost-efficient for the companies selling the solutions and for the customers using the solutions.
In particular, the purpose of this study is to identify different types of benefits for the customers, from using multi-purpose service-robot-enabled solutions. In addition to the academic need to increase understanding on the multidimensional topic, companies need to realise the manifold customer benefits in order to correctly allocate their service development activities and offer the most value-adding services to their customers, which best address the
needs of the customers.