Technological enablers for preventing service failure with e-commerce websites

© 27th European Conference on Information Systems - Information Systems for a Sharing Society, ECIS 2019. All rights reserved. Problems with digital services still occur at times, even for the most reliable services. Considering the consequences of these failures and their effects on the customer's overall service quality perception and satisfaction, preventing these failures, and delivering reliable digital services, is a critical business competency. In addition, the fact that digital services are often co-produced by both service providers and their customers, shows the increasing role of both service providers and customers in preventing digital service failures (or service problems). In this study, we view the concept of digital service failure from the perspective of expectation-conformation theory, develop an Archimate architecture model and use it to design a typology of technological enablers (technologies and technological approaches) that can be used by businesses and their customers to prevent service failures at different stages of online purchase via e-commerce websites. The typology is relevant and useful for management information systems (MIS) academics and practitioners, particularly for information technology and digital service management researchers and the practitioner community.