Conceptualizing customer involvement in energy services – A study of energy companies in Sweden

Paper in proceeding, 2023

The importance of energy services is increasing as it contributes to both improved energy efficiency of customers and increase revenues of energy companies. Customer involvement is crucial in service provision, but previous research does not provide a clear explanation of to what extent different types of energy services are associated with a certain level of customer involvement. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore how energy companies involve customers in different types of services and conceptualize the interconnection between the type of energy services and the level of customer involvement. We adopt a web scraping approach to the web pages of 147 Swedish energy companies and analyze the data by using a framework aiming for conceptualizing the interconnection between the type of energy services and the level of customer involvement. Our preliminary results indicate that these companies rely on varying levels of customer involvement with regard all studied service types. The suggested typology challenges the established assumption that the complexity of the service and the level of customer involvement have a linear relation. The paper thus contributes by showing that the level of customer involvement can be considered as an independent dimension in the analysis of energy services.