Customer boundary work to navigate institutional arrangements around service interactions: Exploring the case of telehealth

Abstract

This research extends literature on value co-creation by examining customer perspectives on institutional arrangements of service systems and how these shape customers' efforts to navigate service interactions. Healthcare provides the empirical context for the study focusing on a digital service technology incorporated into customer interfaces. We report a qualitative inquiry carried out with 19 people with heart disease registered to a telehealth service for remote symptom monitoring. The study focuses on customer perceptions of the key differences between the healthcare system's technological, professional and bureaucratic processes compared to family and community institutions that shape customers' life worlds. We explain how customer perceptions shape healthcare experiences, and patterns of adaptive telehealth usage to co-create value highlighting how customers engage in boundary work. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical implications of applying boundary work to customer experience of digital interfaces within service systems.