Service Complexity and Service Productivity in E-Mobility

The introduction and wide-spread adaptation of e-mobility influences emergency and roadway breakdown service firms. Service complexity and service productivity are important constructs to measure and monitor where the industry is headed and where firms need to quickly adapt. The purpose of this paper is to investigate effects on service complexity and service productivity of emergency and roadway breakdown services on the back of a growing market penetration of electric vehicles in industrialized countries. The study is grounded on expert interviews and a quantitative analysis of 325 questionnaires that have been distributed among roadside assistant service providers in Germany. It reveals the increasing complexity of an important service industry that had only been studied scarcely in the past. With its large-scale quantitative design, it adds significantly to the body of knowledge available and can be the basis for further advanced research in other geographical setti ngs. The research supports practitioners in the field of roadside assistant services in rethinking their service offering and the handling of increasingly heterogeneous propulsion technologies such as electric drives. In order to keep the service productivity high and the complexity low, assistance systems and targeted qualification and training concepts for the roadway personnel have to be developed and rolled out. The research setting is focused on the German market, but links are provided to apply the study design to other countries and further investigate respective market singularities.