How Perceived Service Complexity Erodes Cognitive Capacity in the Selling of Professional Services

摘要

Professional services, like financial or legal services, involve many decision variables that interact in non-simple ways and are therefore "difficult for a client to evaluate" (Patterson, Johnson, and Spreng 1997, p. 4) and perceived to be highly complex. At the same time customer integration and personal interactions are especially important when selling professional services (Reid 2008; Hausman 2003). Yet, the question of how to successfully design professional service encounters in light of high perceived complexity has so far been neglected by research.