I am a doctoral candidate in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. My work empirically links the operational choices firms make in service contexts to customer actions and, in turn, firm performance. My recent projects explore the drivers of self-service customer retention, the role of operational transparency in promoting customer perceptions of technology-mediated service value, the effect of service competition on the quantity and quality of an incumbent’s customer relationships, and how much control a company has over the satisfaction of its customers. Examples of my current research are linked below, and more can be found in the featured research section of this site. Thank you for visiting!
Welcome!
Ryan W. Buell
Doctoral Candidate,
Technology and Operations Management
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Road
Cotting House 319
Boston, MA 02163
phone: 734.846.4800
email: rbuell@hbs.edu
How do Incumbents Fare in the Face of Increased Service Competition?
In this multi-market empirical study of domestic retail banks, we explore how incumbents fare in the face of increasing service competition. In particular, we examine whether and when increasing service competition leads to customer defection and which customers are most vulnerable to its effects. While one view would suggest that customers receiving the lowest quality service in a market might be the most attracted to a new superior service option, we find the opposite. Firms that offer high quality service relative to their local market are more likely to experience customer defection when a superior service competitor enters or expands in their market. Furthermore, we show that it is the high quality firm’s most valuable customers, those with the longest tenure, most products, and highest balances, who are the most vulnerable to superior service alternatives. Along the way, we also show that firms tradeoff price and service quality, and that customers of firms offering relatively low service quality are susceptible to the entry or expansion of inferior service (price) competitors.
The Labor Illusion: How Operational Transparency Increases Perceived Value
A ubiquitous feature of even the fastest self-service technology transactions is the wait. While conventional wisdom and operations theory suggests that the longer people wait, the less satisfied they become, we demonstrate that when websites engage in operational transparency – signaling the work in which they are engaging – people not only mind the wait less, but actually value the service more. Due to what we term the labor illusion, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results, even when those results are identical, provided that the website provides evidence of the effort being exerted. In four studies – which simulated service experiences in the domains of online travel and online dating – we demonstrate the impact of the labor illusion on service value perceptions, benchmark the labor illusion against other strategies for managing wait times, and demonstrate that perceptions of effort mediate the link between operational transparency and increased valuation. [Read more]
Current Research
Photography by Evgenia Eliseeva
