Turning customers into employees : research in progress

This conceptual paper discusses the emerging phenomenon of turning customers into partial employees of companies. In order to study this phenomenon, we intend to look at how companies’ websites are used as a means for transforming aspects of the service experience that used to be performed by employees into aspects that are now performed by customers through interaction with the company’s website. Following a review of the literature, we proceed to describe the development of an instrument that measures the process of Turning Customers Into Employees (TCIE) via content analysis of companies’ websites. We describe the methodology that we intend to use to develop the TCIE instrument in some detail. We conclude the paper by outlining directions for future research that emanate from this preliminary investigation.