Customer Information in New Service Development : Case Study in the Swedish Gaming Industry

Abstract: The power of digital technology serves developers of new services as an access funnel to the vast amount of customer behavioural information. The utilization of this information is forecasted to differentiate the winners from the losers in the market and benefit the new service development process. This study explores the phenomenon of customer information in new service development empirically by looking at the industry at the forefront, the gaming industry. By conducting three case studies with leading Swedish game developers, it challenges the previous research assumptions that acquired and disseminated customer information is implicitly used. This study has made significant contributions by investigating the broader context of customer information use and differentiating among three types of use. The findings show that behavioural information is used to backup own decisions or to enhance the developers understanding, but is not directly applied to the decision task. Despite the great potential, this advanced type of customer information is only used in the post-launch stages of new service development, for service iterations. To further validate the findings and explore information use in new service development more in-depth, future research generating contextual detailed realtime data is needed.