What drives Consumers' Trust in Proactive Services: A Best-Worst scaling approach

Increasing advancements in digital technologies, especially in artificial intelligence, are changing the nature of services. Services no longer rely on the consumers making the first move, but instead, service providers can anticipate consumers’ needs and address them proactively by so-called proactive services (PAS). Within this new service type, consumers may enable the service provider to decide upon the consideration, decision, and enactment of the service. In PAS, consumers assign these previously “owned” phases to the service provider and thereby, also devolve power to the provider. Thus, trust is an indisputable prerequisite for consumer acceptance. However, it is unclear how individual characteristics of PAS impact consumers’ trust. Addressing this research gap, this research-in-progress paper proposes a Best-Worst scaling survey in which potential consumers of two exemplary PAS state their trust with respect to different PAS characteristics. Thereby, this paper will extend the knowledge in understanding PAS.